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SESAME AND LILIES 

TWO LECTURES. 



I 



SESAME AND LILIES 

DELIVERED AT ILANCHESTER IN 1864. 



JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. 



1. OF KINGS' TBEASUBIES. 

2. OF QUEFNS' GARDENS. 

"aTto T'-z^j X'^?^i avtov vrtdysc, xai ayopd^si tbv ouypop ixnvov.' 



KEW YORK: 

SON, 
1865. 



JOHN WILEY & SON, 535 BROADWAY. 



V?. 






\t(o 



t^Ou- 



cm 

Dr. H-N. Fowler 
May IS 1934 



E. CRAIGHEAD, PRINTER, 
81, 83, and S5 Centre St., l^ero York. 



SESAME AKD LILIES. 



LECTURE I.— SESAME. 



I BELIEVE, ladies and gentlemen, that my first duty this even- 
ing is to ask your pardon for the ambiguity of title under 
which the subject of lecture has been announced; and for 
having endeavoured, as you may ultimately think, to obtain 
your audience under false pretences. For indeed I am not 
going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor of treasuries, 
understood to contain wealth ; but of quite another order of 
royalty, and material of riches, than those usually acknow- 
ledged. And I had even intended to ask your attention for 
a little while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives in 
taking a friend to see a favourite piece of scenery) to hide 
what I wanted most to show, with such imperfect cunning 
as I might, until we had unexpectedly reached the best 
point of view by winding paths. But since my good plain- 
* Job xxviii. 5, 6. 



6 SESAME AND LILIES. 

spoken friend, Canon Anson, has already partly anticipated 
my reserved " trot for the avenue " in his first advertised 
title of subject, "How and What to E-ead;" — and as also I 
have heard it said, by men practised in public address, that 
hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavour to 
follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose, I 
wiU take the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly 
that I want to speak to you about books; and about the 
way we read them, and could, or should read them. A 
grave subject, you will say ; and a wide one ! Yes ; so 
wide that I shall make no effort to touch the compass of 
it. I will try only to bring before you a few simple thoughts 
about reading, which press themselves upon me every day 
more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind with 
respect to our daily enlarging means of education, and the 
answeringly wider spreading, on the levels, of the irrigation 
of literature. It happens that I have practically some con- 
nexion with schools for different classes of youth; and I 
receive many letters from parents respecting the education 
of their children. In the mass of these letters, I am always 
struck by the precedence which the idea of a " position in 
life" takes above all other thoughts in the parents' — more 
especially in the mothers' — minds. "The education befit- 
ting such and such a station in life " — this is the phrase, 
this the object, always. They never seek, as far as I can 



make out, an education good in itself: the conception of 
abstract Tightness in training rarely seems reached by the 
writers. But an education "which shall keep a good coat 
on my son's back ; — an education which shall enable him to 
ring with confidence the visitors' bell at double-belled doors ; 
— education which shall result ultimately in establishment of 
a double-belled door to his own house ; in a word, which 
shall lead to advancement in life." It never seems to occur 
to the parents that there may be an education which, in itself. 
is advancement in Life ; — that any other than that may per- 
haps be advancement in Death ; and that this essential edu- 
cation might be more easily got, or given, than they fancy, 
if they set about it in the right way; while it is for no 
price, and by no favour, to be got, if they set about it in 
the wrong. 

Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in 
the mind of this busiest of countries, I suppose the first — 
at least that which is confessed with the greatest frankness, 
and put forward as the fittest stimulus to youthful exertion 
— is this of " Advancement in life." My main purpose this 
evening is to determine, with you, what this idea practically 
includes, and what it should include. 

Practically, then, at present, " advancement in life " means 
becoming conspicuous in life; — obtaining a position which 
shall be acknowledged by others to be respectable or honour- 



8 SESAME AND LILIES. 

able. We do not understand by this advancement, in gene- 
ral, the mere making of money, but the being known to 
have made it; not the accomplishment of any great aim, 
but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a word, we 
mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That 
thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first 
infirmity of weak ones ; and, on the whole, the strongest 
impulsive influence of average humanity : the greatest efiTorts 
of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, 
as its greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure. 

I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want 
you only to feel how it lies at the root of eflfort ; especially 
of all modern effort. It is the gratification of vanity which 
is, with us, the stimulus of toil, and balm of repose; so 
closely does it touch the very springs of life, that the 
wounding of our vanity is always spoken of (and truly) as 
in its measure mortal ; we call it "mortification," using the 
same expression which we should apply to a gangrenous and 
incurable bodily hurt. And although few of us may be phy- 
sicians enough to recognise the various effect of this passion 
upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know, 
and would at once acknowledge, its leading power with 
them as a motive. The seaman does not commonly desire 
to be made captain only because he knows he can manage 
the ship better than any other sailor on board. He wants 



OF kings' tkeasueies. 9 

to be made captain that he may be Galled captain. The 
clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only 
because he believes that no other hand can, as firmly as 
his, direct the diocese through its difficulties. He wants to 
be made bishop primarily that he may be called " My Lord." 
And a prince does not usually desire to enlarge, or a subject 
to gain, a kingdom because he believes that no one else can 
as well serve the state upon the throne ; but, briefly, because 
he wishes to be addressed as "Your Majesty," by as many 
lips as may be brought to such utterance. 

This, then, being the main idea of advancement in life, 
the force of it applies, for all of us, according to our station, 
particularly to that secondary result of such advancement 
which we call "getting into good society." We want to 
get into good society, not that we may have it, but that 
we may be seen in it ; and our notion of its goodness de- 
pends primarily on its conspicuousness. 

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I 
fear you may think an impertinent question? I never can 
go on with an address unless I feel, or know, that my audi- 
ence are either with me or against me : (I do not much care 
which, in beginning ;) but I must know where they are ; and 
I would fain find out, at this instant, whether you think I 
am putting the motives of popular action too low. I am 

resolved to-night, to state them low enough to be admitted 

1* 



10 SESAME ASTD LILIES. 

as probable ; for whenever, in my writings on Political Eco- 
nomy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity, — or what 
used to be called " virtue " — may be calculated upon as a 
human motive of action^ people always answer me, saying, 
"You must not calculate on that: that is not in human 
nature : you must not assume anything to be common to 
men but acquisitiveness and jealousy; no other feeling ever 
has influence on them, except accidentally, and in matters 
out of the way of business." I begin accordingly to-night 
low down in the scale of motives ; but I must know if you 
think me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those who 
admit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive 
in men's minds in seeking advancement, and the honest 
desire of doing any kind of duty to be an entirely secondary 
one, to hold up their hands. (About a dozen of hands held 
up — the audience partly not being sure the lecturer is serious^ 
and partly shy of expressing opinion.) I am quite serious 
— I really do want to know what you think ; however, I can 
judge by putting the reverse question. Will those who 
think that duty is generally the first, and love of praise the 
second motive, hold up their hands ? ( 0)ie hand reported to 
have been held up^ behind the lecturer.) Yery good : I see 
you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too 
near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting 
farther question, I venture to assume that you will admit 



11 

duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think 
that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some 
real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a 
secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You 
will grant that moderately honest men desire place and 
office, at least in some measure for the sake of their benefi- 
cent power; and would wish to associate rather with sensi- 
ble and well-informed persons than with fools and ignorant 
persons, whether they are seen in the company of the sensi- 
ble ones or not. And finally, without being troubled by 
repetition of any common truisms about the preciousness of 
friends, and the influence of companions, you will admit, 
doubtless, that according to the sincerity of our desire that 
our friends may be ti-ue, and our companions wise, — and in 
proportion to the earnestness and discretion with which we 
choose both, will be the general chances of our happiness 
and usefulness. 

But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to 
choose our friends well, how few of us have the power ! or, 
at least, how limited, for most, is the sphere of choice ! 
Nearly all our associations are determined by chance or 
necessity ; and restricted within a narrow circle. We can- 
not know whom we would ; and those whom we know, we 
cannot have at our side when we most need them. All the 
higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath, 



12 SESAME AND LILIES. 

only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good 
fortune, obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound 
of his voice ; or j^ut a question to a man of science, and be 
answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes' 
talk on a cabinet minister, answered probably with words 
worse than silence, being deceptive ; or snatch, once or twice 
in our lives, the privilege of throwmg a bouquet in the path 
of a Princess, or arresting the kind glance of a Queen. And 
yet these momentary chances we covet ; and spend our years, 
and passions, and powers in pursuit of little more than 
these ; while, meantime, there is a society continually open 
to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, what- 
ever our rank or occupation ; — talk to us in the best words 
they can choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And 
this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, — and 
can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audi- 
ence, but to gain it ; — kings and statesmen lingering patiently 
in those plainly furnished and narrow anterooms, our book- 
case shelves, — we make no account of that company, — per- 
haps never listen to a word they would say, all day long ! 

You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that 
the apathy with which we regard this company of the noble, 
who are praying us to hsten to them, and the passion with 
which we pursue the company, probably of the ignoble, who 
despise us, or who have nothing to teach us, are grounded in 



13 

this, — that we can see the faces of the living men, and it is 
themselves, and not their sayings, with which we desire to 
become familiar. But it is not so. Suppose you never were 
to see their faces ; — suppose you could be put behind a screen 
in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber, would 
you not be glad to listen to their words, though you were 
forbidden to advance beyond the screen? And when the 
screen is only a little less, folded in two, instead of four, and 
you can be hidden behind the cover of the two boards that 
bind a book, and listen, all day long, not to the casual talk, 
but to the studied, determined, chosen addresses of the wisest 
of men ; — this station of audience, and honourable privy 
council, you despise ! 

But perhaps you will say that it is because the living 
people talk of things that are passing, and are of immediate 
interest to you, that you desire to hear them. Nay; that 
cannot be so, for the living people will themselves tell you 
about passing matters, much better in their writings than in 
their careless talk. But I admit that this motive does influ- 
ence you, so far as you prefer those rapid - and ephemeral 
writings to slow and enduring writings — books, properly so 
called. For all books are divisible into two classes, the 
books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark this dis- 
tinction — it is not one of quality only. It is not merely the 
bad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It 



14 SESAME AND LILIES. 

is a distinction of species. There are good books for the 
hour, and good ones for all time ; bad books for the hour, 
and bad ones for all time. I must define the two kinds 
before I go farther. 

The good book of the hour, then, — I do not speak of the 
bad ones — is sunply the useful or pleasant talk of some per- 
son whom you cannot otherwise converse with, printed for 
you. Very useful often, telling you what you need to know; 
very pleasant often, as a sensible friend's present talk would 
be. These bright accounts of travels ; good-humoured and 
witty discussions of question; lively or pathetic story- 
telling in the form of novel ; firm fact-telling, by the real 
agents concerned in the events of passing history ;^all these 
books of the hour, multipljdng among us as education 
becomes more general, are a peculiar characteristic and 
possession of the present age: we ought to be entirely 
thankful for them, and entirely ashamed of ourselves if we 
make no good use of them. But we make the worst pos- 
sible use, if we allow them to usurp the place of true books : 
for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merely 
letters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter 
may be delightful, or necessary, to-day : Avhether worth 
keeping or not, is to be considered. The newspaper may 
be entirely proper at breakfast time, but assuredly it is not 
reading for all day. So, though bound up in a volume, the 



15 

long letter which gives you so pleasant an account of the 
inns, and roads, and weather last year at such a place, or 
which tells you that amusmg story, or gives you the real 
circumstances of such and such events, however valuable 
for occasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the 
word, a "book" at all, nor, in the real sense, to be " read." 
A book is essentially not a talked thing, but a written thing ; 
and written, not with the view of mere communication, but 
of permanence. The book of talk is printed only because 
its author cannot speak to thousands of people at once ; if 
he could, he would — the volume is mere multiplication of 
his voice. You cannot talk to your friend in India ; if you 
could, you would ; you write instead : that is mere con- 
veyance of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply 
the voice merely, not to carry it merely, but to preserve it. 
The author has something to say which he perceives to 
be true and useful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he 
knows, no one has yet said it ; so far as he knows, no one 
else can say it. He is bound to say ii, clearly and melo- 
diously if he may ; clearly, at all events. In the sum of 
his life he finds this to be the thing, or group of things, 
manifest to him ; — this the piece of true knowledge, or sight, 
which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him 
to seize. He would fain set it down for ever ; engrave it 
on rock, if he could ; saying, " This is the best of me ; for 



16 SESAME A>rD LILLES. 

the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved, and hated, like 
another ; my life was as the vapour, and is not ; but this 
I saw and knew : this, if anythiog of mine, is worth yonr 
memor}'." That is his " writing ; " it is, in his small human 
wav, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is in him, 
his inscription, or scripture. That is a " Book." 

Perhaps yon think no books were ever so written ? 

But, again, I ask you, do yon at all beheve in honesty, 
or at all in kindness? or do you think there is never any 
honesty or benevolence in wise people? Xone of us, I 
hope, are so unhappy as to think that. Well, whatever bit 
of a wise man's work is honestly and benevolently done, 
that bit is his book, or his piece of art. It is mixed always 
with evil fragments — iU-doDe, redundant, affected work. 
But if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true 
bits, and those are the book. 

Xow books of this kind have been writteD lq all ages by 
their greatest men ; — ^bygreat leaders, great statesmen, and 
great thinkers. XJiese are aU at your choice ; and life is 
short. You have heard as much before; — yet have you 
measured and mapped out this short life and its possibik- 
ties ? Do you know, if yon read this, that you cannot read 
that — ^that what yon lose to-day you cannot gain to-morrow ? 
Will yon go and gossip with your housemaid, or your stable 
boy, when you may talk with queens and kings ; or flatter 



17 

yourselves that it is with any worthy consciousness of your 
own claims to respect that you jostle with the common 
crowd for entree here, and audience there, when all the 
while this eternal court is open to you,* with its society wide 
as the world, multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the 
mighty, of every place and time ? Into that you may enter 
always ; in that you may take fellowship and rank accord- 
ing to your wish ; from that, once entered into it, you can 
never be outcast but by your own fault; by your aristocracy 
of comj)anionship there, your own inherent aristocracy will 
be assuredly tested, and the motives with which you strive 
to take high place in the society of the living, measured, as 
to all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place 
you desire to take in this company of the Dead. 

" The place you desire," and the place you Jit yourself 
for^ I must also say; because, observe, this court of the 
past differs from all living aristocracy in this : — it is open to 
labour and to merit, but to nothing else. No wealth will 
bribe, no name overawe, no artifice deceive, the guardian 
of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, no vile or vulgar 
person ever enters there. At the portieres of that silent 
Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question, " Do 
you deserve to enter ? " " Pass. Do you ask to be the 
companion of nobles ? Make yourself noble, and you shall 
be. Do you long for the conversation of the wise ? Learn 



18 SESAME AND LILIES. 

to understand it, and you shall liear it. But on other 
terms ? — ^no. If you will not rise to us, we cannot stoop to 
you. The living lord may assume courtesy, the living philo- 
sopher explain his thought to you with considerable pain ; 
but here we neither feign nor interpret ; you must rise to the 
level of our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, 
and share our feelings, if you would recognise our presence." 

This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it 
is much. You must, in a word, love these people, if you 
are to be among them. ISTo ambition is of any use. They 
scorn your ambition. You must love them, and show your 
love in these two following ways. 

I. — First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and 
to enter into their thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe ; 
not to find your own expressed by them. If the j)erson 
who wrote the book is not wiser than you, you need not 
read it ; if he be, he will think differently from you in many 
respects. 

Yery ready we are to say of a book, " How good this is — 
that's exactly what I think !" But the right feeling is, " How 
strange that is ! I never thought of that before, and yet I 
see it is true ; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day." 
But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that 
you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours. 
Judge it afterwards, if you think yourself qualified to do so ; 



OF kings' treasuries. 19 

but ascertain it first. And be sure also, if the author is worth 
anything, that you will not get at his meaning all at once ; — 
nay, that at his whole meaning you will not for a long time 
arrive in any wise. 'Not that he does not say what he means, 
and in strong words too ; but he cannot say it all ; and what 
is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and in parables, 
in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quite see 
the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in the 
breasts of wise men which makes them always hide their 
deeper thought. They do not give it you by way of help, 
but of reward, and will make themselves sure that you 
deserve it before they allow you to reach it. But it is the 
same with the physical type of wisdom, gold. There seems, 
to you and me, no reason why the electric forces of the earth 
should not carry whatever there is of gold within it at once 
to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know 
that all the gold they could get was there ; and without any 
trouble of digging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, 
cut it away, and coin as much as they needed. But Nature 
does not manage it so. She puts it in little fissures in the 
earth, nobody knows where : you may dig long and find 
none ; you must dig painfully to find any. 

And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When 
you come to a good book, you must ask yourself, " Am I 
inclined to work as an Australian miner would ? Are my 



20 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pickaxes and shovels m good order, and am I in good trim 
myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, and my breath good, 
and my temper ?" And, keeping the figure a little longer, 
even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly useful 
one, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind 
or meaning, his words are as the rock which you have to 
crush and smelt in order to get at it. And your pickaxes 
are your own care, wit, and learning ; your smelting-furnace 
is your own thoughtful soul. Do not hope to get at any 
good author's meaning without those tools and that fire ; 
often you wall need sharpest, finest chiselling, and patientest 
fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal. 

And, therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authori- 
tatively, (I hnow I am right in this,) you must get into the 
habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of 
their meaning, syllable by syllable — nay, letter by letter. 
For though it is only by reason of the opposition of" letters 
in the function of signs, to sounds in function of signs, that 
the study of books is called " literature," and that a man 
versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of 
letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet 
connect with that accidental nomenclature this real principle : 
— that you might read all the books in the British Museum 
(if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly " illi- 
terate," uneducated person ; but that if you read ten pages 



OF kings' treasuries. 21 

of a good book, letter by letter, — that is to say, with real 
accuracy, — you are for evermore in some measure an educated 
person. The entire difference between education and non- 
education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), con- 
sists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not 
know many languages, — may not be able to speak any but his 
own, — may have read very few books. But whatever language 
he knows, he knows precisely ; whatever word he pronounces 
he pronounces rightly ; above all, he is learned in the peerage 
of words ; knows the words of true descent and ancient 
blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille ; remem- 
bers all their ancestry — their intermarriages, distantest rela- 
tionships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and 
offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at 
any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person 
may know by memory any number of languages, and talk 
them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, — not a word 
even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman 
will be able to make his way ashore at most ports ; yet he 
has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known 
for an illiterate person ; so also the accent, or turn of expres- 
sion of a single sentence will at once mark a scholar. And 
this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated 
persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, 
in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man 



22 SESAME AND LILIES. 

a certain degree of inferior standing for ever. And this is 
right ; but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on is not 
greater, and required to a serious i^urpose. It is right that a 
false Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of 
Commons ; but it is wrong that a false English meaning 
should 7iot excite a frown there. Let the accent of words be 
watched, by all means, but let their meaning be watched 
more closely still, and fewer will do the work. A few words 
well chosen and well distinguished, will do work that a thou- 
sand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in the 
function of another. Yes; and words, if they are not 
watched, will do deadly work sometimes. There are masked 
words droning and skulking about us in Europe just now, — 
(there never were so many, owing to the spread of a shallow, 
blotching, blundering, infectious "information," or rather 
deformation, everywhere, and to the teaching of catechisms 
and phrases at schools instead of human meanings) — there 
are masked words abroad, I say, which nobody understands, 
but w^hich everybody uses, and most people will also fight 
for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this, or that, 
or the other, of things dear to them : for such w^ords wear 
chama^leon cloaks — " groundlion " cloaks, of the colour of the 
ground of any man's fancy : on that ground they lie in wait, 
and rend him with a spring from it. There were never crea- 
tures of prey so mischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, 



OF kings' treasuries. 23 

never poisoners so deadly, as these masked words ; they are 
the unjust stewards of all men's ideas : whatever fancy or 
favourite instinct a man mos^ cherishes, he gives to his favour- 
ite masked word to take care of for him ; the word at last 
comes to have an infinite power over him, — you cannot get 
at him but by its ministry. And in languages so mongrel in 
breed as the English, there is a fatal power of equivocation 
put into men's hands, almost whether they will or no, in 
being able to use Greek or Latin forms for a word when they 
want it to be respectable, and Saxon or otherwise common 
forms when they want to discredit it. What a singular and 
salutary effect, for instance, would be produced on the minds 
of people who are in the habit of taking the Form of the 
words they live by, for the Power of which those words tell 
them, if we always either retained, or refused, the Greek 
form " biblos," or " biblion," as the right expression for 
" book " — instead of employing it only in the one instance in 
which we wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it 
everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for the many 
simple persons who worship the Letter of God's Word 
instead of its Spirit, (just as other idolaters worship His pic- 
ture instead of His presence,) if, in such places (for instance) ^ 
as Acts xix. 19 we retained the Greek expression, instead of 
translating it, and they had to read — " Many of them also 
which used curious arts, brought their bibles together, and 



24 SESAME AND LILIES. 

burnt them before all men ; and they counted the price of 
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver ! " Or if, 
on the other hand, we translatecb instead of retaining it, and 
always spoke of " the Holy Book," instead of " Holy Bible," 
it might come into more heads than it does at present that 
the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and 
by which they are now kept in store,* cannot be made a 
present of to anybody in morocco binding ; nor sown on any 
wayside by help either of steam plough or steam press ; but 
is nevertheless being offered to us daily, and by us with con- 
tumely refused ; and sown in us daily, and by us as instantly 
as may be, choked. 

So, again, consider what effect has been produced on the 
English vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form 
"damno," in translating the Greek xaraxpivu, when people 
charitably wish to make it forcible ; and the substitution of 
the temperate " condemn" for it, when they choose to keep 
it gentle. And. what notable sermons have been preached 
by illiterate clergymen on — " He that believeth not shall be 
damned ; " though they would shrink with horror from trans- 
lating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of his house, by which he 
damned the world," or John viii. 12, "Woman, hath no man 
damned thee ? She saith, No man. Lord. Jesus answered 
her, Neither do I damn thee ; go and sin no more." And 
* 2 Peter iii. 5 — 1. 



OF kings' treasuries. 25 

divisions in the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of 
blood, and in the defence of which the noblest souls of men 
have been cast away in frantic desolation, countless as forest- 
leaves — ^though, in the heart of them, founded on deeper 
causes — have nevertheless been rendered practicably possi- 
ble, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greek word 
for a public meeting, to give peculiar respectability to such 
meetings, when held for religious purposes ; and other colla- 
teral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of using 
the word " priest " as a contraction for " presbyter." 

Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit 
you must form. Nearly every word in your language has 
been first a word of some other language — of Saxon, German, 
French, Latin, or Greek; (not to speak of eastern and primi- 
tive dialects.) And many words have been all tliGse ; — that 
is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next, French or Ger- 
man next, and English last : undergoing a certain change 
of sense and use on the lips of each nation ; but retaining a 
deep vital meaning which all good scholars feel in employing 
them, even at this day. If you do not know the Greek 
alphabet, learn it ; young or old — girl or boy — whoever you 
may be, if you think of reading seriously (which, of course, 
implies that you have some leisure at command), learn your 
Greek alphabet ; then get good dictionaries of all these 
languages, and whenever you are in doubt about a word, 



26 SESAME AND LILIES. 

hunt it down j^atiently. Read Max Miiller's lectures tho- 
rougUy, to begin with ; and, after that, never let a word 
escape you that looks suspicious. It is severe work ; but 
you will find it, even at first, interesting, and at last, end- 
lessly amusing. And the general gain to your character, in 
power and precision, will be quite incalculable. 

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, 
Greek, or Latin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn 
any language perfectly. But you can easily ascertain the 
meanings through which the English word has passed; and 
those which in a good writer's work it must still bear. 

And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your 
permission, read a few lines of a true book with you, care- 
fully ; and see what will come out of them. I will take a 
book perfectly known to you all ; No English words are more 
familiar to us, yet nothing perhaps has been less read with 
sincerity. I will take these few following lines of Lycidas. 

"Last came, and last did go, 

The pilot of the Galilean lake ; 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain), 

He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake, 

How well could I have spar'd for thee, young swain, 

Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 

Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold 1 



27 

Of other care they little reckonmg make, 

Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast, 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 

Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else, the least 

That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs I 

What recks it them ? What need they ? They are sped ; 

And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 

Grrate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw; 

The hungry sheep lo6k up, and are not fed. 

But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw, 

Eot inwardly, and foul contagion spread ; 

Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 

Daily devours apace, and nothing said." 

Let us think over this passage, and examine its words. 

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. 
Peter, not only his full episcopal function, but the very typdS 
of it which Protestants usually refuse most passionately ? 
His " mitred " locks ! Milton was no Bishop-lover ; how 
comes St. Peter to be " mitred ? " " Two massy keys he 
bore." Is this, then, the power of the keys claimed hj the 
Bishops of Rome, and is it acknowledged here by Milton 
only in a poetical licence, for the sake of its picturesqueness, 
that he may get the gleam of the golden keys to help his 
effect? Do not think it. Great men do not play stage 
tricks with doctrines of life and death : only little men do 



28 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that. Milton means what he says ; and means it with his 
might too — is going to put the whole strength of his spirit 
presently into the saying of it. For though not a lover of 
false bishops, he ioas a lover of true ones ; and the Lake- 
pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head of true epis- 
copal power. For Milton reads that text, " I will give unto 
thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven " quite honestly. 
Puritan though he be, he would not blot it out of the book 
because there have been bad bishops ; nay, in order to under- 
stand him, we must understand that verse first ; it will not 
do to eye it askance, or whisper it under our breath, as if it 
were a weapon of an adverse sect. It is a solemn, univer- 
sal assertion, deejDly to be kept in mind by all sects. But 
perhaps we shall be better able to reason on it if we go on a 
little farther, and come back to it. For clearly, this marked 
insistance on the power of the true episcopate is to make us 
feel more weightily what is to be charged against the false 
claimants of episcopate ; or generally, aganist false claimants 
of power and rank in the body of the clergy ; they who, " for 
their 'bellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the 
fold." 

Do not think Milton uses those three words to fill up his 
verse, as a loose writer would. He needs all the three ; 
specially those three, and no more than those — " creep," and 
" intrude," and " climb :" no other words would or could 



OF kings' treasuries. 29 

serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they 
exhaustively comprehend the three classes, correspondent to 
the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiasti- 
cal power. First, those who " creep^^ into the fold ; who do 
not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do 
all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility 
of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, 
and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who 
"intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by 
natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, 
and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and 
authority with the common crowd. Lastly, those who 
" climb," who, by labour and learning, both stout and sound, 
but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition, gain 
high dignities and authorities, and become " lords over the 
heritage," though not " ensamples to the flock." 
Now go on : — 

'' Of other care they little reckoning make, 
Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast. 
Blind mouths — " 

I pause again, for this is a strange expression ; a broken 
metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly. 

IS^ot so : its very audacity and pithiness are intended to 



30 SESAME AND LILIES. 

make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those 
two monosyllables express the j^recisely accurate contraries 
of right character, in the two great offices of the Chm*ch — 
those of bishop and pastor. 

A Bishoj) means a person who sees. 

A Pastor means one who feeds. 

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore 
to be Blind. 

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be 
fed, — to be a Mouth. 

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind 
mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. 
Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops 
desiring power more than light. They want authority, not 
outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule ; though it 
may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king's 
office to rule ; the bishoj)'s office is to oversee the flock ; to 
number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full 
accoimt of it. Now it is clear he cannot give accomit of the 
souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his 
flock. The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is 
at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, 
he can obtain the history from childhood of every living soul 
in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back 
street. Bill, and Nancy, knocking each other's teeth out ! — 



OF kings' tkeasuribs. 81 

Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon 
them ? Has he had his eye upon them ? Can he circum- 
stantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating 
IRancy about the head ? If he cannot, he is no bishop, 
though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple ; he is no 
fej-shop, — he has sought to be at the helm instead of the 
masthead ; he has no sight of things. " N'ay," you say, it is 
not his duty to look after Bill in the back street. What \ 
the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is only those 
he should look after, while (go back to your Milton) " the 
hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim 
wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing about it) 
" daily devours apace, and nothing said ? " 

" But that's not our idea of a bishop." Perhaps not ; but 
it was St. Paul's ; and it was Milton's. They may be right, 
or we may be ; but we must not think we are reading either 
one or the other by putting our meaning into their words. 

I go on. 

"But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

This is to meet the vulgar answer that " if the poor are not 
looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they 
have spiritual food." 

And Milton says, " They have no such thing as spiritual 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

food ; they are only swollen witli wind." At first you may 
tliiuk that is a coarse tyi^e, and an obscure one. But again, 
it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and 
Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of " Spirit." 
It is only a contraction of the Latin word " breath," and an 
indistinct translation of the Greek word for " wind." The 
same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth w^here it 
listeth ;" and in writing, " So is every one that is born of the 
Spirit ;" born of the hreath^ that is ; for it means the breath 
of God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in 
our words " inspiration" and " expire." ^N'ow, there are two 
kinds of breath wdth which the flock may be filled ; God's 
breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, 
and peace to them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on 
the hills; but man's breath — the word which he calls 
spiritual, — ^is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the 
fen. They rot inwardly with it ; they are pufi*ed up by it, as 
a dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This 
is literally true of all false religious teaching ; the first, and 
last, and fatalest sign of it is that " puffing up." Your con- 
verted children, who teach their parents ; your converted 
convicts, who teach honest men ; your converted dunces, 
who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, 
suddenly awaking to the fact of there being a God, fancy 
themselves therefore His peculiar people and messengers; 



or kings' teeasukies. 33 

your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or 
Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think 
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong ; and 
pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be 
saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word 
instead of act, and wish instead of work : — these are the true 
fog children — clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, 
of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh : blown 
bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with — corrupt, and corrupt- 
ing, — " Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw." 

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of 
the keys, for now we can understand them. ^NTote the differ- 
ence between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this 
power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he sup- 
poses hoth the keys to be of the gate of heaven ; one is of 
gold, the other of silver : they are given by St. Peter to the 
sentinel angel ; and it is not easy to determine the meaning 
either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of 
the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of 
heaven ; the other, of iron, the key of the prison, in which 
the wicked teachers are to be bound who " have taken away 
the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves." 

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to 

see, and feed ; and, of all who do so, it is said, " He that 

watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the reverse is 

2* 



34 SESAME AND LILIES. 

truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself; 
and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight, — 
shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens 
here, as well as hereafter : he who is to be bound in heaven 
must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong 
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, " Take him, 
and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its 
measure, against the teacher, for every hel]) withheld, and for 
every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced ; so 
that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and 
farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the 
bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as " the golden 
opes, the iron shuts amain." 

We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much 
more is yet to be found in them ; but w^e have done enough 
by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examina- 
tion of your author which is rightly called *' reading ;" 
watching every accent and expression, and jDutting ourselves 
always in the author's place, annihilating our own person- 
ality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly 
to say, " Thus Milton thought," not " Thus I thought, in 
mis-reading Milton." And by this process you will gradually 
come to attach less weight to your own " Thus I thought" at 
other times. You will begin to perceive that what you 
thought was a matter of no serious importance ; — that yom* 



OF kings' teeasukies. 35 

thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and 
wisest that could be arrived at thereupon : — in fact, that 
unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to 
have any " thoughts" at all ; that you have no materials for 
them, in any serious matters; — -no right to "think," but only 
to try to learn more of the facts. 'Naj^ most probably all 
your life (unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you 
will have no legitimate right to an " opinion" on any busi- 
ness, except that instantly under your hand. What must of 
necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, 
how to do. Have you a house to keep in order, a commo- 
dity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch to cleanse? There 
need be no two opinions about these proceedings ; it is at 
your peril if you have not much more than an " opinion" on 
the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your 
own business, there are one or two subjects on which you 
are bomid to have but one oj)inion. That roguery and lying 
are objectionable, and are instantly to be flogged out of the 
way whenever discovered ; — that covetousness and love of 
quarrelling are dangerous dispositions even in children, and 
deadly dispositions in men and nations ; — that in the end, the 
God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind 
people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones ; — on 
these general facts you are bound to have but one, and that 
a very strong, opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

governments, sciences, arts, you will find that, on the whole, 
you can know xothing, — judge nothing ; that the best you 
can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is 
to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to under- 
stand a little more of the thoughts of others, which so soon 
as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the 
thoughts even of the wisest are very little more than perti- 
nent questions. To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and 
exhibit to you the grounds for //idecision, that is all they can 
generally do for you! — and well for them and for us, if 
indeed they are able " to mix the music with our thoughts, 
and sadden us with heavenly doubts." This writer, from 
whom I have been reading to you, is not among the first or 
wisest : he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it is 
easy to find out his full meaning, but with the greater men, 
you cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly 
measure it themselves, — it is so wide. Suppose I had asked 
you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead 
of Milton's, on this matter of Church authority ? — or for 
Dante's? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea 
what either thought about it ? Have you ever balanced the 
scene with the bishops in Richard III. against the character 
of Cranmer ? the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic 
against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon 
him, — " disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio ;" or of 



OP kings' TEEASUEIES. 87 

him whom Dante- stood beside, " come '1 frate che confessa 
lo perfido assassin ? "* Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men 
better than most of us, I presume ! They were both in the 
midst of the main struggle between the temporal and spiri- 
tual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess? But 
where is it? Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's or 
Dante's creed into articles, and send that up into the Eccle- 
siastical Courts ! 

You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and 
many a day, to come at the real purposes and teaching 
of these great men ; but a very little honest study of them 
will enable you to perceive that what you took for your own 
"judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and drifted, help- 
less, entangled weed of castaway thought : nay, you will see 
that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough 
heath wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, 
partly overgrown with pestilent brakes and venomous wind- 
sown herbage of evil surmise ; that the first thing you have 
to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly and scornfully to set 
fireto^A^s/ burn all the jungle into wholesome ash-heaps, 
and then plough and sow. All the true literary work before 
you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order, 
" Break up your fallow ground, find sow not among thornsP 

II. Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers, 
* Inf. xix. 71: xxiii. 11*7. 



38 SESAME AND LILIES. 

that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this 
higher advance to make; — you have to enter into their 
Hearts. As you go to them first for clear sight, so you must 
stay with them that you may share at last their just and 
mighty Passion. Passion, or " sensation." I am not afraid 
of the word ; still less of the thing. You have heard many 
outcries against sensation lately ; but, I can tell you, it is 
not less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling dif- 
ference between one man and another, — between one animal 
and another, — is precisely in this, that one feels more than 
another. If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not 
be easily got for us ; if we were earth-worms, liable at every 
instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much 
sensation might not be good for us. But, being human crea- 
tures, it is good for us ; nay, we are only human in so far as 
we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely in proportion 
to our passion. 

You know I said of that great and pure society of the 
dead, that it would allow " no vain or vulgar person to enter 
there." What do you think I meant by a " vulgar" person ? 
What do you yourselves mean by " vulgarity ?" You will 
find it a fruitful subject of thought; but, briefly, the essence 
of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation. Simple and inno- 
cent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped blunt- 
ness of body and mind ; but in true inbred vulgarity, there 



OF kings' tkeasuries. 39 

is a deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capa- 
ble of every sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, 
without pleasure, without horror, and without pity. It is 
in the blunt hand and the dead heart, in the diseased habit, 
in the hardened conscience, that men become vulgar ; they 
are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they are 
incapable of sympathy, — of quick understanding, — of all 
that, in deep insistance on the common, but most accurate 
term, may be called the "tact" or touch-faculty of body and 
soul : that tact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the 
pure woman has above all creatures ; — fineness and fulness 
of sensation, beyond reason ; — the guide and sanctifier of 
reason itself. Reason can but determine what is true : — it 
is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can recog- 
nise what God has made good. 

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not 
merely to know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel 
with them what is Righteous. Now, to feel with them, we 
must be like them ; and none of us can become that without 
pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and tested know- 
ledge, — ^not the first thought that comes, — so the true passion 
is disciplined and tested passion — not the first passion that 
comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treache- 
rous ; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far, 
in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true 



40 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pnriDose and no true passion left. N^ot that any feeling pos- 
sible to humanity is in itself wrong, but only wrong when 
undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and justice; it is 
wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There is 
a mean wonder as of a child Avho sees a juggler tossing 
golden balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think 
that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which 
every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of 
heaven tossed through the night by the Hand that made 
them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child opening a 
forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's busi- 
ness; — and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front of 
danger, the source of the great river beyond the sand — the 
place of the great continents beyond the sea ; — a nobler 
curiosity still, which questions of the source of the River of 
Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven, — things 
which "the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is 
ignoble, with which you linger over the course and cata- 
strophe of an idle tale ; but do you think the anxiety is less, 
or greater, with which you watch, or ought to watch, the 
dealings of fate and destiny with the life of an agonised 
nation ? Alas ! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, 
of your sensation that you have to deplore in England at 
this day ; — sensation which spends itself in bouquets and 
speeches; in revelliiigs and junketings; in sham fights and 



OF kings' treasuries. 41 

gay puppet shows, wliUe you can look on and see noWe 
nations niurdereJ, man by man, woman by woman, child by 
child, without an effort, or a tear. 

I s.ml "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but 
in a word, I ought to have said "injustice" or "unrighteous- 
ness " of sensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman better 
to be discerned from a vulgar person, so in nothing is 
a gentle nation (such nations have been) better to be 
decerned from a mob, than in this,-that their feelings 
are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and 
of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; 
its feelmgs may be-usually are-on the whole generous 
and right; but it has no foundation for them, no hold 
of them; you may tease or tickle it into any, at your 
pleasure ; it thhiks by infection, for the most part, catching 
a passion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it 
will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on ;— 
nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when 
- the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, 
passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great 
nation, for inst.ance, does not spend its entire national 
wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a 
single rufiian's having done a single murder; and for a 
couple of years, see its own children murder each other 
by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, consider- 



42 SESAME AND LILIES. 

ing only what the effect is likely to be on the price 
of cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side 
of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a great nation 
send its poor little boys to jail for stealing six walnuts; 
and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of 
thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor 
men's savings, to close their doors " under circumstances 
over which they have no control," with a* "by your leave;" 
and large landed estates to be bought by men who have 
made their money by going with armed steamers up and 
down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, 
and altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the com- 
mon highwayman's demand of " your money or your life," 
into that of " your money and your life." Neither does a 
great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be 
parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them 
by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra 
per week to its landlords ;* and then debate, with drivelling 

* See the evidence in the Medical officer's report to the Privy Council, 
just published. There are suggestions in its preface which will make 
some stir among us, I fancy, respecting which let me note these points 
following: — 

There are two theories on the subject of land now abroad, and in conten- 
tion ; both false. 

The first is that by Heavenly law, there have always existed, and must 



43 

tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not 
piously to save, and nursingly cherish, the Kves of its 

continue to exist, a certain number of hereditarily sacred persons, to whom 
the earth, air, and water of the world belong, as personal property ; of 
which earth, air, and water these persons may, at their pleasure, permit, or 
forbid, the rest of the human race to eat, to breathe, or to drink. This 
theory is not for many years longer tenable. The adverse theory is that 
a division of the land of the world among the mob of the world would 
immediately elevate the said mob into sacred personages; that houses 
would then build themselves, and corn grow of itself; and that everybody 
would be able to hve, without doing any work for his Hving. This theory 
would also be found highly untenable in practice. 

It will, however, require some rough experunents, and rougher cata- 
strophes, even in this magnesium-Ughted epoch, before the generahty of 
persons will be convinced that no law concerning anything, least of 
all concerning land, for either holding or dividing it, or renting it 
high, or renting it low, would be of the smallest ultimate use to the 
people, so long as the general contest for Ufe, and for the means of hfe, 
remains one of mere brutal competition. That contest, in an unprincipled 
nation, will take one deadly form or another, whatever laws you make for 
it. For instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for England, if it 
could be carried, that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes, 
according to classes ; and that every nobleman's income should be paid to 
him as a fixed salary or pension by the nation ; and not squeezed by him 
in a variable sum, at discretion, out of the tenants of his land. But if you 
could get such a law passed to-morrow; and if, which would be farther 
necessary, you could fix the value of the assigned incomes by making a 



44 SESAME AND LILIES. 

murderers. Also, a great nation having made up its mind 
that hanging is quite the wholesomest process for its 

given weight of pure wlieat-flour legal tender for a given sum, a twelve- 
month would not pass before another currency would have been tacitly 
established, and the power of accumulative wealth would have re-asserted 
itself in some other article, or some imaginary sign. Forbid men to buy 
each other's hves for sovereigns, and they wiU for shells, or slates. Tliere 
is only one cure for pubUc distress — and that is public education, directed 
to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. There are, indeed, many laws 
conceivable which would gradually better and strengthen the national 
temper ; but, for the most part, they are such as the national temper must 
be much bettered before it would bear. A nation in its youth may be 
helped by laws, as a weak child by backboards, but when it is old, it cannot 
that way straighten its crooked spine. 

And besides, the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one ; distribute 
the earth as you will, the principal question remains inexorable, — Who is 
to dig it ? Which of us, in brief words, is to do the hard and dirty work 
for the rest — and for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean 
work, and for what pay ? Who is to do no work, and for what pay ? And 
there are curious moral and religious questions connected with these. How 
far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, 
in order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together, and make one 
very beautiful or ideal soul ? If we had to deal with mere blood, instead 
of spirit, and the thing might hterally be done (as it has been done with 
infants before now) so that it were possible, by taking a certain quantity of 
blood from the arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it all into 
one person, to make a more azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing 



OF kings' teeasukies. 45 

homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish 
between the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not 
yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood- 
track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpate 
Othello, "perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment 
that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make i:)olite 
speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their 
father's sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster 
than a country butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, 
a great nation does not mock Heaven and its Powers, by 

■would of course be managed ; but secretly, T should conceive. But now, 
because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be 
done quite openly ; and we live, we gentlemen, on deUcatest prey, after the 
manner of weasels ; that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns dig- 
ging and ditching, and generally stupified, in order that we, being fed 
gratis, may have all the thinkuig and feeling to ourselves. Tet there is a 
great deal to be said for this. A highly-bred and trained English, French, 
Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more a lady) is a great production ; a 
better production than most statues ; being beautifully coloured as well as 
shaped, and plus all the brains ; a glorious thing to look at, a wonderful 
thing to talk to ; and you cannot have it, any more than a pyramid or a 
church, but by sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is, perhaps, 
better to build a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple ; 
and more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above us, than 
to a waU ; only the beautiful human creature wiU have some duties to do 
in return — duties of Mving belfry and rampart — of which presently. 



46 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love 
of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at 
the same time, that it is actuated, and intends to be 
actuated, in all chief national deeds and measures, by- 
no other love. 

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk 
about reading. "We want some sharper discipline than that 
of reading ; but, at all events, be assured, we cannot read. 
N'o reading is possible for a people with its mind in this 
state. No sentence of any great writer is intelligible to 
them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the English 
public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful writing, 
— so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of 
avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than 
this incapacity of thought ; it is not corruption of the inner 
nature ; we ring true still, when anything strikes home to 
us ; and though the idea that everything should " pay " has 
infected our every purpose so deeply, that even when we 
would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our two- 
pence and give them to the host, without saying, " When I 
come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capa- 
city of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it in 
our work — in our war, — even in those unjust domestic affec- 
tions which make us furious at a small private wrong, while 
we are polite to a boundless public one : we are still indus- 



OF kings' treasuries. 47 

trious to the last hour of the day, though we add the gam- 
bler's fury to the labourer's patience ; we are still brave to 
the death, though mcapable of discerning true cause for bat- 
tle, and are still true in affection to our own flesh, to the 
death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And 
there is hope for a nation while this can be still said of it. 
As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give it for its 
honour (though a foolish honour),, for its love (though a sel- 
fish love), and for its business (though a base business), there 
is *hope for it. But hope only ; for this instinctive, reckless 
virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a 
mob of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline 
its passions, and direct them, or they will discipline it, one 
day, with s-corpion whips. Above all, a nation cannot last as 
a money-making mob : it cannot with impunity, — it cannot 
with existence, — go on despising literature, despising science, 
despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and 
concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these 
are harsh or wild words ? Have patience with me but a 
little longer. I will jorove their truth to you, clause by 
clause. 

I. I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as 
a nation, care about books ? How much do you think we 
spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as com- 
pared with what we spend on our horses ? If a man spends 



48 &ESAME AND LTLIES. 

lavishly on Lis library, you call Mm raad— a biblio-maniac. 
But you never call any one a liorse-raaniac, though men ruin 
themseh'es every clay by their horses, and you do not hear 
of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower 
still, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves 
of the United Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as 
compared with the contents of its wine-cellars ? What posi- 
tion would its expenditure on literature take, as compared 
with its expenditure on luxurious eating ? We talk of food 
for the mind, as of food for the body : now a good book con- 
tains such food inexhaustibly ; it is a provision for life, and 
for the best part of us ; yet how long most people would look 
at the best book before they would give the price of a large 
turbot for it ! Though there have been men who have 
pinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, 
whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, 
than most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to such 
trial, and more the pity ; for, indeed, a precious thing is all 
the more precious to us if it has been w^on by w^ork or 
economy ; and if public libraries were half as costly as pub- 
lic dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what bracelets 
do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect 
there was good in reading, as well as in munching and spark- 
ling; whereas the very cheapness of literature is making 
even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is 



OF kings' treasuries. 49 

worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not 
worth much / nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and 
reread, and loved, and loved again ; and marked, so that you 
can refer to the passages you want in it, as a soldier can 
seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewife 
bring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is 
good ; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, 
in a good book ; and the family must be poor indeed which, 
once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, 
pay their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and 
we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's books 
out of circidating libraries ! 

II. I say we have despised science. " "What !" (you ex- 
claim) " are we not foremost in all discovery, and is not the 
whole world giddy by reason, or unreason, of our inven- 
tions ?" Yes ; but do you suppose that is national work ? 
That work is all done in spite of the nation ; by private 
people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to 
make our profit of science ; we snap up anything in the way 
of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough ; but 
if the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to us^ that 
is another story. What have we publicly done for science ? 
We are obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of 
our ships, and therefore we pay for an observatory ; and we 
allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be annu- 



50 SESAME AND LILIES. 

ally tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, 
for the British Museum ; sullenly aj^prehending that to be a 
place for keeping stuffed birds in, to amuse our children. If 
anybody will pay for their own telescope, and resolve ano- 
ther nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it were our 
own ; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly 
perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something 
else than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and 
tells us where the gold is, and where the coals, we understand 
that there is some use in that; and very properly knight him: 
but is the accident of his having found out how to employ 
himself usefully any credit to us ? (The negation of such 
discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be some 
t?25credit to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt 
these generalities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon, 
illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago there was 
a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria ; 
the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for 
perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a 
whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced 
by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market 
worth, among private buyers, would probably have been 
some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the 
English nation for seven hundred : but we would not give 
seven hundred, and the whole series would have been in the 



51 

Munich museum at tliis moment, if Professor Owen* had not, 
with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the Bri- 
tish public in person of its representatives, got leave to give 
four hundred pounds at once, and himself become answer- 
able for the other three ! which the said public will doubtless 
pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about 
the matter all the while ; only always ready to cackle if any 
credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, 
w^hat this fact means. Your annual expenditure for public 
purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at least 50 
millions. Now 700^. is to 50,000,000/. roughly, as seven 
pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose then, a gentleman 
of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured 
from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park- 
walls and footmen only, professes himself fond of science ; 
and that one of his servants comes eagerly to tell him that 
an unique collection of fossils, giving clue to a new era of 
creation, is to be had for the sum of seven pence sterling; 
and that the gentleman, who is fond of science, and spends 
two thousand a year on his park, answers, after keeping his 
servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you four 

* I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission : which of course 
he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it ; but I -consider 
it so important that the public should be aware of the fact, that I do what 
seems to me right, though rude. 



52 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pence for tliem, if you will be answerable for tbe extra three- 
pence yourself, tiU next year!" 

III. I say you have despised Art I " What !" you again 
answer, " have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we 
not pay thousands of pounds for single pictures ? and have 
we not Art schools and institutions, more than ever nation 
had before ?" Yes, truly, but all that is for the sake of the 
shop. You would fain sell canvas as well as coals, and crock- 
ery as well as iron ; you would take every other nation's 
bread out of its mouth if you could ; not being able to do 
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the 
world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer- 
by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your own 
faculties or circumstances ; you fancy that, among your damp, 
flat, fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the 
Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his 
volcanic cliffs ; — that Art may be learned as book-keeping is, 
and when learned, will give you more books to keep. You 
care for pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the 
bills pasted on your dead walls. There is always room on 
the wall for the bills to be read, — never for the pictures to 
be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (by 
repute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, 
nor whether they are taken care of or not ; in foreign coun- 
tries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the 



OF kings' treasuries. 53 

world rotting in abandoned wreck — (and, in Venice, with the 
Austrian guns deliberately pointed at the palaces containing 
them), and if you heard that all the Titians in Europe were 
made sand-bags to-morrow on the Austrian forts, it would 
not trouble you so much as the chance of a brace or two of 
game less in your own bags in a day's shooting. That is 
your national love of Art. 

IV. You have despised nature ; that is to say, all the deep 
and sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revo- 
lutionists made stables of the cathedrals of France ; you have 
made racecourses of the cathedrals of the earth. Your one 
conception of pleasure is to drive in railroad carriages round 
their aisles, and eat off their altars. You have put a railroad 
bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have tunnelled 
the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel ; you have destroyed 
the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva ; there is not a quiet 
valley in England that you have not filled with bellowing 
fire ; there is no particle left of English land which you have 
not trampled coal ashes into — nor any foreign city in which 
the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair old 
streets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of 
new hotels and perfumers' shops : the Alps themselves, which 
your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as 
soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to 
climb, and slide down again, with "shrieks of delight." 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

When you are past shrieking, having no human articulate 
voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude of their 
valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red with 
cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive 
hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrow- 
fullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the 
deep inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the 
valley of Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty 
howitzers ; and the Swiss vintagers of . Zurich expressing 
their Christian thanks for the gift of the vine, by assembling 
in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," and slowly 
loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till evening. 
It is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty; more 
pitiful, it seems to me, to have concejDtions like these, of 
mirth. 

Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of 
words of mine for proof of this. I will merely j^rint one of 
the newspaper paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting 
out and throwing into my store-drawer ; here is one from a 
Daily Telegraph of an early date this year; date which, 
though by me carelessly left unmarked, is easily discoverable ; 
for on the back of the slip, there is the announcement that 
"yesterday the seventh of the special services of this year 
was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul's ; " and 
there is a pretty piece of modern political economy besides, 



55 

worth preserving note of, I think, so I print it in the note 
below.* But my business is with the main paragraph, relat- 
ing one of such facts as happen now daily, which, by chance, 
has taken a form in which it came before the coroner. I 
will print the paragraph in red.f Be sure, the facts them- 
selves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall all 
of us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some 
day. 

" An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy 
coroner, at the White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spital- 
fields, respecting the death of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. 
Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said that she lived 
with the deceased and his son in a room at 2, Cobb's court, 
Christ Church. Deceased was a 'translator' of boots. 
Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased and his 
son made them into good ones, and then witness sold them 

* It is announced that an arrangement has been concluded between 
the Mnistry of Fmance and the Bank of Credit for the payment of the 
eleven millions which the State has to pay to the National Bank by the 14th 
Inst. This sum wiU be raised as follows : — The eleven commercial members 
of the committee of the Bank of Credit will each borrow a million of florins 
for three months of this bank, which wiU accept their bills, which again 
will be discounted by the National Bank. By this arrangement the National 
Bank will itself furnish the funds with which it luill he paid. 

f The following extract was printed in red in the English edition. 



56 SESAME AND LILIES. 

i'oT what she could get at the shops, which was very little 
indeed. Deceased and his son used to work night and day to 
try and get a little bread and tea, and pay for the room 
(25. a week), so as to keep the home together. On Friday- 
night week deceased got up from his bench and began to 
shiver. He threw down the boots, saying, ' Somebody else 
must finish them when I am gone, for I can do no more.' 
There was no fire, and he said, ' I would be better if I was 
warm.' Witness therefore took two pairs of translated 
boots to sell at the shop, but she could only get lid. for 
the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, ' We must 
have our profit.' Witness got 14lb. of coal, and a little 
tea and bread. Her son sat up the whole night to make the 

* translations,' to get money, but deceased died on Saturday 
morning. The family never had enough to eat. — Coroner: 

* It seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the 
workhouse.' — Witness: 'We wanted the comforts of our 
little home.' A juror asked what the comforts were, for 
he only saw a little straw in the corner of the room, the 
windows of which were broken. The witness began to cry, 
and said that they had a quilt and other little things. The 
deceased said he never would go into the workhouse. In 
summer, when the season was good, they sometimes made as 
much as 10s. profit in the week. They then always saved 
towards the next week, which was generally a bad one. In 



67 

winter they made not half so much. For three years they 
had been getting from bad to worse. — Cornelius Collins said 
that he had assisted his father since 1847. They used to 
work so far into the night that both nearly lost their 
eyesight. Witness now had a film over his eyes. Five 
years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. The 
relieving officer gave him a 41b. loaf, and told him if 
he came again he should ' get the stones.' * That disgusted 

* I do not know what this means. It is curiously coincident in verbal 
form, with a certain passage which some of us may remember. It 
may perhaps be well to preserve beside this paragraph, another cutting 
out of my store-drawer, from the Morning Post, of about a parallel date, 

Friday, March 10th, 1865:— "The salons of Mme. , who did the 

honours with clever imitative grace and elegance, were crowded with 
princes, dukes, marquises, and counts — in fact, with the same male com- 
pany as one meets at the parties of the Princess Metternich and Madame 
Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members of Parliament were 
present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and dazzlingly improper scene. 
On the second floor the supper tables were loaded with every dehcacy 
of the season. That your readers may form some idea of the dainty 
fare of the Parisian demimonde, I copy the menu of the supper, which 
was served to aU the guests (about 200) seated at four o'clock. Choice 
Tquem, Johannisberg, LaflStte, Tokay, and Champagne of the finest 
vintages were served most lavishly throughout the morning. After 
supper dancing was resumed with increased animation, and the ball 
terminated with a chaine diaholique and a cancan Wenfer at seven in the 
morning. (Morning-service — 'Ere the fresh lawns appeared, under the 



58 SESAME AND LILIES. 

deceased, and he would have nothmg to do with them since. 
They got worse and worse until last Friday week, when 
they had not even a halfi^enny to buy a candle. Deceased 
then lay down on the straw, and said he could not live 
till morning. — A juror: You are dying of starvation yourself, 
and you ought to go into the house until the summer. 
Witness : If we went in we should die. When we come out 
in the summer we should be like people dropped from the 
sky. Xo one would know us, and we would not have even 
a room. I could work now if I had food, for my sight 
would get better. Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased died 
from syncope, from exhaustion from want of food. The 
deceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had 
« had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a particle 
of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if there 
had been medical attendance, he might have survived the 
syncope or fainting. . The coroner having remarked upon the 
l^ainful nature of the case, the jury returned the following 

opening eyelids of the Morn. — ') Here is the menu : — ' Consomme de 
volaille a la Bagration; 16 hors-d'oeuvres varies. Bouchees a la TaUey- 
raud. Saumons froids, sauce Eavigote. Pilets de boeuf en Bellevue, 
timbales milanaises chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes trufifees. Pates de 
foies gras, buissons d'ecrevisses, salades venetiennes, gelees blanches 
aux fruits, gateaux mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glaces 
Ananas. Dessert.' " 



OF kings' treasuries. 59 

verdict, ' That deceased died from exhaustion from want of 
food and the common necessaries of life; also through want 
of medical aid.' " 

"Why would witness not go into the workhouse?" you 
ask. Well, the poor seem to have a prejudice against the 
workhouse which the rich have not ; for of course every one 
who takes a pension from Government goes into the work- 
house on a grand scale : only the workhouses for the 
rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called 
play-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it 
appears ; perhaps if we made the play-houses for them pretty 
and pleasant enough, or gave them their pensions at home, 
and allowed them a Uttle introductory peculation with the 
public money, their minds might be reconciled to it. Mean- 
time, here are the facts : we make our relief either so insult- 
ing to them, or so painful, that they rather die than take it at 
our hands ; or, for third alternative, we leave them so 
untaught and foolish that they starve like brute creatures, 
wild and dumb, not knowing what to do, or what to ask. I 
say, you despise compassion ; if you did not, such a news- 
paper paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian 
country as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public 
streets.* "Christian" did I say? Alas, if we were but 

* I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the Pall Mall Gazette 



60 SESAME AND LILIES. 

wholesomely un-Christian, it would be impossible : it is om* 
imaginary Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, 

established ; for the power of the press in the hands of highly-educated 
men, in hidependent position, and of honest purpose, may indeed become 
all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor wiU therefore, 
I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my respect for the 
journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its third number, page 5, 
which was wrong ia every word of it, with the intense wrongness which 
only an honest man can achieve who has taken a false turn of thought 
in the outset, and is following it, regardless of consequences. It contained 
at the end this notable passage : — 

"The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction — aye, and the bed- 
steads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law ought to 
give to outcasts merely as outcasts.'''' I merely put beside this expression of 
the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of the message which 
Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a trumpet" in declaring to the 
gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife, and to smite with the fist 
of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I have chosen, to deal thy bread 
to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out (margin 
'afflicted') to thy house." The falsehood on which the writer had mentally 
founded himself, as previously stated by him, was this : "To confound the 
functions of the dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers 
of a charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence 
is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus 
reversed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem 
of national distress. " To understand that the dispensers of the poor-rates 
arc the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its alms with a 



OF kings' treasueies. 61 

for we revel and luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation 
of it ; dressing it up, like everything else, in fiction. Tlie 
dramatic Christianity of the organ and aisle, of dawn-service 
and twilight-revival — the Christianity which we do not fear 
to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play about the 
devil, in our Satanellas, — Roberts, — Fausts, chanting hymns 
through traceried windows for back-ground effect, and artisti- 
► cally modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation 
of mimicked prayer ; (while we distribute tracts, next day, 
for the benefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we 
suppose to be the signification of the Third Commandment ;) 
— this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are 
triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the 
touch of the heretics who dispute it. But to do a piece of 
common Christian righteousness in a plain English word or 
deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found one 
National act or hope thereon, — we know too well what our 
faith comes to for that ! You might sooner get lightning 
out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your 
modern English religion. You had better get rid of the 
smoke, and the organ pipes, both; leave them, and the 

gentleness and freedom of hand as mucli greater and franker than that 
possible to individual charity, as the collective national wisdom and power 
may be supposed greater than those of any single person, is the foundation 
of all law respecting pauperism." 



62 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to the property man ; 
give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthy 
expiration, and look after Lazarus at the door-step. For 
there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another 
helpfully, and that is the only holy or Mother Church which 
ever was, or ever shall be. 

All these pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I repeat, 
you nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you< 
who do not ; by whose work, by whose strength, by whose 
life, by whose death, you live, and never thank them. Your 
wealth, your amusement, your pride, would all be alike 
impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The 
policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all 
night to watch the guilt you have created there, and may 
have his brains beaten out and be maimed for life at any 
moment, and never be thanked ; the sailor wrestling with the 
sea's rage ; the quiet student poring over his book or his 
vial ; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without 
bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hope- 
less, and spurned of all : these are the men by whom Eng- 
land lives ; but they are not the nation ; they are only the 
body and nervous force of it, acting still from old habit in a 
convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our 
National mind and purpose are to be amused ; our National 
religion, the performance of church ceremonies, and preach- 



OF kings' treasuries. 63 

ing of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly 
at work, while we amuse ourselves ; and the necessity for 
this amusement is fastening on us as a feverous disease of 
parched throat and wandering eyes — senseless, dissolute, 
merciless. When men are rightly occupied, their amuse- 
ment grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a 
fruitfid flower ; — when they are faithfully helpful, and com- 
♦passionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, 
and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. 
But now, having no true business, we pour our whole mascu- 
line energy into the false business of money-making ; and 
having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed 
up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, 
but guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pic- 
tures on cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The 
justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on the 
stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute 
the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature 
of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) 
for the noble grief we should have borne with our fellows, 
and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloat 
over the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew 
of the grave. 

It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these 
things ; the facts are frightful enough j — the measure of 



64 SESAME AND LILIES. 

national fault involved in them is perhaps not as great as it 
would at first seem. We permit, or cause, thousands of 
deaths daily, but we mean no harm ; we set fire to houses, 
and ravage peasants' fields ; yet we should be sorry to find 
we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart ; still 
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the 
end of hisJong life, having had much power with the public, 
being plagued in some serious matter by a reference to 
"public opinion," uttered the impatient exclamation, "The 
public is just a great baby !" And the reason that I have 
allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix them- 
selves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, 
the more I see of our national faults or miseries, the more 
they resolve themselves into conditions of childish illiterate- 
ness, and want of education in the most ordinary habits of 
thought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness 
of brain, which we have to lament ; but an unreachable 
schoolboy's recklessness, only difi*ering from the true school- 
boy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it acknow- 
ledges no master. There is a curious type of us given in 
one of the lovely, neglected works of the last of our great 
painters. It is a drawing of Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, 
and of its brook, and valley, and hills, and folded morning 
sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of the dead 
who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a 



OF kings' teeasueies. 65 

group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a 
grave, to strike them off with stones. So do we lAaj with 
the words of the dead that would teach us, and strike them 
far from us with our bitter, reckless will, little thinking that 
those leaves which the wind scatters had been piled, not only 
upon a gravestone, but upon the seal of an enchanted vault — 
nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings, who would 
awake for us, and walk w^ith us, if we knew but how to call 
them by their names. How often, even if we lift the marble 
entrance gate, do we but wander among those old kings in 
their repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the 
crowns on their foreheads ; and still they are silent to us, and 
seem but a dusty imagery ; because we know not the incan- 
tation of the heart that would wake them ; — which, if they 
once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power 
of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us ; and, 
as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, 
" Art thou also become weak as we — art thou also become 
one of us ?" so would these kings, with their undimmed, 
unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, " Art thou also become 
pure and mighty of heart as we ? art thou also become one 
of us?" 

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind — "magnanimous" — to 
be this, is indeed to be great in life ; to become this increas- 
ingly, is, indeed, to " advance in life," — in life itself— not in 



QQ SESAME AND LILIES. 

the trappings of it. My friends, do you remember that old 
Scythian custom, when the head of a house died ? How he 
was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his chariot, and 
carried about to his friends' houses ; and each of them placed 
him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence ? 
Suppose it were offered to you, in plain words, as it is offered 
to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian hon- 
our, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Sup- 
pose the offer were this : " You shall die slowly ; your blood 
shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at 
last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your life shall 
fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of 
Caina ; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more 
gaily, and set in higher chariots, and have more orders on 
its breast — crowns on its head, if you will. Men shall bow 
before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it up and 
down the streets ; build palaces for it, feast with it at their 
tables' heads all the night long ; your soul shall stay enough 
within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the 
golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown- 
edge on the skull ; — no more. Would you take the offer, 
verbally made by the death-angel? Would the meanest 
among us take it, think you ? Yet practically and verily we 
grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure ; many of us grasp 
at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, who 



OF kings' teeasuries. 67 

desires to advance in life without knowing what hfe is ; who 
means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, 
and more fortune, and more public honour, and — not more 
personal soul. He only is advancing in life, whose heart is 
getting softer, whose blood warmer, whose brain quicker, 
whose spirit is entering into Living * peace. And the men 
who have this life in them are the true lords or kings of the 
earth — they, and they only. All other kingships, so far as 
they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of 
theirs ; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties, — 
costly shows, with real jewels instead of tinsel — the toys of 
nations ; or else, they are no royalties at all, but tyrannies, 
or the mere active and practical issue of national folly ; for 
which reason I have said of them elsewhere, " Visible govern- 
ments are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, 
the harness of some, the burdens of more." 

But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear 
Kinghood still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if 
governed nations were a personal property, and might be 
bought and sold, or otherwise acquired, as sheep, of whose 
flesh their king was to feed, and whose fleece he was to 
gather ; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base kings, " peo- 
ple-eating," were the constant and proper title of all mo- 
narchsj and enlargement of a king's dominion meant the 

* " TO 6i ^povrina rov nvtviiaros ^wfj Kai si pnv y) '^ 



68 SESAME AND LILIES. 

same thing as the increase of a private man's estate ! Kings 
who think so, however powerful, can no more be the true 
kings of the nation than gad-flies are the kings of a horse ; 
they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. 
They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one could 
see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with 
bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered, trumpeting 
in the summer air ; the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes 
fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists 
of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, 
if at all, and hate ruling ; too many of them make " il gran 
refiiito ;" and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are 
likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its " gran 
reMto" of them. 

Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if 
ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by the 
fo7xe of it, — not the geographical boundaries. It matters 
very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, or 
Khine rounds you a castle less there. But it does matter to 
you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, 
" Go," and he goeth ; and to another, " Come," and he 
Cometh. Whether you can turn your people as you can 
Trent — and where it is that you bid them come, and where 
go. It matters to you, king of men, whether your people 
hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by you. 



OF kings' treasuries. 69 

Yoli may measure your dominion by multitudes better than 
by miles ; and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but 
to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator. Measure ! nay, 
you cannot measure. Who shall measure the difference 
betAveen the power of those who " do and teach," and who 
are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven— and the 
power of those Avho undo, and consume— whose power, at 
the fullest, is only the power of the moth and the rust? 
Strange ! to think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures for 
the moth, and the Rust-kings, who are to their peoples' 
strength as rust to armour, lay up treasures for the rust ; and 
the Kobber-kings, treasures for the robber; but how few 
kings have ever laid up treasures that needed no guarding — 
treasures of which, the more thieves there were, the better ! 
Broidered robe, only to be rent— helm and sword, only to be 
dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be scattered — there have 
been three kinds of kings who have gathered these. Sup- 
pose there ever should arise a Fourth order of kings, who 
had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that there 
was a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold 
could not equal, neither should it be valued with pure gold. 
A web more fair in the weaving, by Athena's shuttle; an 
armour, forged in diviner fire by Vulcanian force— a gold 
only to be mined in the sun's red heart, where he sets over 
the Delphian cliffs ;— deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable 



70 SESAME AND LILIES. 

armour, potable gold !— the three great Angels of Conduct, 
Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting at the posts 
of our doors, to lead us, if we would, with their winged 
power, and guide us, with their inescapable eyes, by the 
path which no fowl knoweth,,and which the vulture's eye 
has not seen ! Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard 
and believed this word, and at last gathered and brought 
forth treasures of— Wisdom— for their people ? 

Think what an amazing business that would be ! How 
inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom. 
That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise 
instead of a bayonet exercise ! — organize, drill, maintain with 
pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of 
armies of stabbers! — find national amusement in reading- 
rooms as well as rifle-grounds ; give prizes for a fair shot at a 
fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an 
absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of 
the capitalists of civilized nations should ever come to sup- 
port literature instead of war ! Have yet patience with me, 
while I read you a single sentence out of the only book, pro- 
perly to be called a book, that I have yet written myself, the 
one that will stand, (if anything stand,) surest and longest of 
all work of mine. 

" It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe 
that it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports unjust wars. Just 



71 

wars do not need so much money to support them ; for most of the 
men who wage such, wage them gratis ; but for an unjust war, men's 
bodies and souls have both to be bought ; and the best tools of war 
for them besides, which makes such war costly to the maximum ; not 
to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations 
which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to 
buy an hour's peace of mind with ; as, at present France and Eng- 
land, purchasing of each other ten millions' sterling worth of conster- 
nation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns and half aspen 
leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by the ' science ' of the modern 
political economist, teaching covetousness instead of truth). And, all 
unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage of the enemy, only by 
loans from capitahsts, these loans are repaid by subsequent taxation 
of the people, who appear to have no will in the matter, the capital- 
ists' will being the primary root of the war ; but its real root is the 
covetousness of the whole nation, rendering it incapable of faith, 
frankness, or justice, and bringing about, therefore, in due time, his 
own separate loss and punishment to each person." 

France and England literally, observe, buy panic of each 
other; they pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand 
pounds' worth of terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of 
buying these ten millions' worth of panic annually, they 
made up their minds to be at peace with each other, and buy 
ten millions' worth of knowledge annually ; and that each 
nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a year in 
foundmg royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, 



72 SESAME AND LILIES. 

royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not be better 
somewhat for both French and English ? 

It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Never- 
theless, I hope it will not be long before royal or national 
libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a 
royal series of books in them ; the same series in every one 
of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prej)ared for 
that national series in the most perfect way possible ; their 
text i^rinted all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and 
divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, 
and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work ; and 
that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and 
orderly persons at all times of the day and evening ; strict 
law being enforced for this cleanliness and quietness. 

I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and for 
natural history galleries, and for many precious, many, it 
seems to me, needful, things ; but this book plan is the easi- 
est and needfullest, and would prove a considerable tonic to 
what we call our British constitution, which has fallen drop- 
sical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and 
wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws 
repealed for it ; try if you cannot get corn laws established 
for it, dealing in a better bread ; — ^bread made of that old 
enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors ; — 
doors, not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries. 



OF kings' teeasuries. 73 

Friends, the treasuries of true kings are the streets of their 
cities ; and the gold they gather, which for others is as the 
mire of the streets, changes itself, for them and their people, 
into a crystalline pavement for evermore. 



LECTURE II.— LILIES. 

OF queens' gardens. 

It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel of one 
previously given, that I should shortly state to you my gene- 
ral intention in both. The questions specially proposed to you 
in the first, namely. How and What to Read, rose out of a far 
deeper one, which it was my endeavour to make you propose 
earnestly to yourselves, namely, TF7iy to Read. I want you 
to feel, with me, that whatever advantages we possess in the 
present day in the diffusio:i of education and of literature, 
can only be rightly used by any of us when we have appre- 
hended clearly what education is to lead to, and literature to 
teach. I wish you to see that both well-directed moral train- 
ing and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of a power 
over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to the 
measure of it, in the truest sense, Mngly ; conferring indeed 
the purest kingship that can exist among men: too many 
other kingships (however distinguished by visible insignia 
or material power) being either spectral, or tyrannous; — 

* Canticles ii. 2. 



OF queens' gakdens. 75 

Spectral — that is to say, aspects and shadows only of royalty, 
hollow as death, and which only the "Likeness of a kingly 
crown have on ;" or else tyrannous — that is to say, substi- 
tuting their own will for the law of justice and love by which 
all true kings rule. 

There is, then, I repeat — and as I want to leave this idea 
with you, I begin with it, and shall end with it — only one 
pure kind of kingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, 
crowned or not : the kingship, namely, which consists in a 
stronger moral state, and a truer thoughtful state, than that 
of others ; enabling you, therefore, to guide, or to raise 
them. Observe that word " State ;" we have got into a loose 
way of using it. It means literally the standing and stability 
of a thing ; and you have the full force of it in the derived 
word " statue " — " the immoveable thing." A king's majesty 
or " state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be called a 
state, depends on the movelessness of both: — without tre- 
mor, without quiver of balance ; established and enthroned 
upon a foundation of eternal law which nothing can alter nor 
overthrow. 

Believing that all literature and all education are only use- 
ful so far as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and 
therefore kingly, power — first, over ourselves, and, through 
ourselves, over all around us, I am now going to ask you to 
consider with me farther, what special portion or kind of 



76 SESAME AND LTLTES. 

this royal authority, arising out of noble education, may 
rightly be possessed by women ; and how far they also are 
called to a true queenly power. 'Not in their households 
merely, but over all within their sphere. And in what sense, 
if they rightly understood and exercised this royal or gra- 
cious influence, the order and beauty induced by such benig- 
nant power would justify us in speaking of the territories 
over which each of them reigned, as " Queens' Gardens." 

And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper 
question, which — strange though this may seem — remains 
among many of us yet quite undecided, in spite of its infinite 
importance. 

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women 
should be, until we are agreed what their ordinary power 
should be. We cannot consider how education may fit them 
for any widely extending duty, until we are agreed what is 
their true constant duty. And there never was a time when 
wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination per- 
mitted, res]3ecting this question — quite vital to all social 
happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly 
nature, their difierent capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem 
never to have been yet measured with entire consent. We 
hear of the mission and of the rights of Woman, as if these 
could ever be separate from the mission and \he rights of 
Man ; — as if she and her lord were creatures of independent 



OF queens' G'^llDEM^S. 77 

kind and of irreconcileable claim. This, 'at. least, is wrong. 
And not less wrong— perhaps even more foolishly wrong (for 
I will anticipate thus far what I hope'to* pro,Ye>— is the idea 
that woman is only the shadow and atj^ea^^nf image of her 
lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience, and 
supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of 
his fortitude. 

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her 
who was made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could 
be helped effectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave I 

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and 
harmonious idea (it must be harmonious if it is true) of what 
womanly mind and virtue are in power and office, with 
respect to man's ; and how their relations, rightly accepted, 
aid, and increase, the vigour, and honour, and authority of 

both. 

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last lecture : 
namely, that the first use of education was to enable us to 
consult with the wisest and the greatest men on all points of 
earnest difficulty. That to use books rightly, was to go to 
them for help : to appeal to them, when our own knowledge 
and power of thought failed ; to be led by them into wider 
sight, purer conception than our own, and receive from them 
the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, 
against our solitary and unstable opinion. 



78 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the 
wisest, the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise 
on this point : let us hear the testimony they have left 
respectiDg what they held to be the true dignity of woman, 
and her mode of help to man. 

And first let us take Shakespeare. 

'Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes ; — 
he has only heroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure 
in all his plays, except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, 
exaggerated for the pui*poses of the stage ; and the still 
slighter Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Yerona. 
In his laboured and perfect plays you have no hero. 
Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not been 
so great as to leave him the prey of every base practice 
round him ; but he is the only example even approximating 
to the heroic type. Coriolanus — Caesar — Antony, stand in 
flawed strength, and fall by their vanities ; — Hamlet is indo- 
lent, and drowsily speculative ; Romeo an impatient boy ; the 
Merchant of Venice languidly submissive to adverse fortune ; 
Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, but too rough 
and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, and he 
sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble, 
is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, 
saved, by Rosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has 
not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and error- 



OF queens' gakdens. 79 

less purpose; Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, 
Imogen, Queen Katlierine, Perdita, Sylvia, Yiola, Rosalind, 
Plelena, and last, and perhaps loveliest, Virgilia, are aU fault- 
less ; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity. 
Then observe, secondly. 

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly 
or fault of a man ; the redemption, if there be any, is by the 
wisdom and virtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is 
none. The catastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own 
want of judgment, his impatient vanity, his misunderstanding 
of his children ; the virtue of his one true daughter would 
have saved him from all the injuries of the others, unless he 
had cast her away from him; as it is, she all but saves him. 

Of Othello I need not trace the tale ;— nor the one weak- 
ness of his so mighty love ; nor the inferiority of his percep- 
tive intellect to that even of the second woman character hi 
the play, the Emilia who dies in wild testimony against his 
error:— "Oh, murderous coxcomb! What should such a 
fool Do with so good a wife ?" 

In Komeo and Juhet, the wise and entirely brave strata- 
gem of the wife is brought to ruinous issue by the reckless 
impatience of her husband. In Winter's Tale, and in Cym- 
beline, the happiness and existence of two princely house- 
holds, lost through long years, and imperilled to the death 
by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemed at 



80 SESAME AND LILIES. 

last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In 
Measure for Measure, the injustice of the judges, and the 
corrujDt cowardice of the brother, are opposed to the victori- 
ous truth and adamantine purity of a woman. In Coriolanus, 
the mother's counsel, acted upon in time, would have saved 
her son from all evil; his momentary forgetfulness of it is 
his ruin ; her prayer at last granted, saves him — not, indeed, 
from death, but from the curse of living as the destroyer of 
hrs country. 

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickle- 
ness of a lover who is a mere wicked child? — of Helena, 
against the petulance and insult of a careless youth ? — of the 
patience of Hero, the passion of Beatrice, and the calmly 
devoted wisdom of the " unlessoned girl," who appears 
among the helplessness, the blindness, and the vindictive 
passions of men, as a gentle angel, to save merely by her 
presence, and defeat the worst intensities of crime by her 
smile ? 

Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shake- 
speare's plays, there is only one weak woman— Ophelia ; and 
it is because she fails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is 
not, and cannot in her nature be, a guide to him when he 
needs her most, that all the bitter catastrophe follows. 
Finally, though there are three wicked women among the 
principal figures, Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril, they 



OF queens' gardens. 81 

are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary- 
laws of life ; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the 
l^ower for good which they have abandoned. 

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the 
position and character of women in human life. He repre- 
sents them as infallibly faithful and wise counsellors, — incor- 
ruptiblyjust and pure examples — strong always to sanctify, 
even when they cannot save. 

Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature 
of man, — still less in his understanding of the causes and 
courses of fate, — but only as the writer who has given us the 
broadest view of the conditions and modes of ordinary 
thought in modern society, I ask you next to receive the 
witness of Walter Scott. 

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no 
value : and though the early romantic poetry is very beauti- 
ful, its testimony is of no weight, other than that of a boy's 
ideal. But his true works, studied from Scottish life, bear 
a true witness, and in the whole range of these there are but 
three men who reach the heroic type — Dandie Dinmont, Rob 
Roy, and Claverhouse : of these, one is a border farmer ; ano- 
ther a freebooter ; the third a soldier in a bad cause. And 
these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courage and 
faith, together witK a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenly 

applied, intellectual power ; while his younger men are the 

4* 



82 SESAME AND LILIES. 

gentlemanly ^^laythings of fantastic fortune, and only by aid 
(or accident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials 
they involuntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent 
character, earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing 
with forms of hostile evil, definitely challenged, and reso- 
lutely subdued, there is no trace in his concej^tions of men. 
Whereas in his imaginations of women, — in the characters of 
Ellen Douglas, of Flora Maclvor, Rose Bradwardine, Cathe- 
rine Seyton, Diana Yernon, Lilias Redgamitlet, Alice Bridge- 
north, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans, — with endless varieties 
of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, we find in all a 
quite infallible and inevitable sense of dignity and justice ; 
a fearless, instant, and mitiring self-sacrifice to even the 
aj^pearance of duty, much more to its real claims ; and, 
finally, a patient wisdom of deeply restrained affection, which 
does infinitely more than protect its objects from a momen- 
tary error ; it gradually forms, animates, and exalts the 
characters of the unworthy lovers, until, at the close of the 
tale, we are just able, and no more, to take patience in hear- 
ing of their unmerited success. 

So that in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is 
the woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth ; 
it is never, by any chance, the youth who watches over or 
educates his mistress. 

Next, take, though more briefly, graver and deeper testi- 



OF queens' gardens. 83 

mony — that of the great Italians and Greeks. Yon know 
well the plan of Dante's great poem — that it is a love-poem 
to his dead lady, a song of praise for her watch over his soul. 
Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet saves him from 
destruction — saves him from hell. He is going eternally 
astray in despair ; she comes down from heaven to his help, 
and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, inter- 
preting for him the most difficult truths, divine and human ; 
and leading him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star. 
I do not insist upon Dante's conception ; if I began I 
could not cease : besides, you might think this a wild ima- 
gination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to you 
a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to 
his living lady, wholly characteristic of tlie feeling of all 
the noblest men of the thirteenth century, preserved among 
many other such records of knightly honour and love, which 
Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among the early 
Italian poets. 

For lo ! thy law is passed 
That this my love should manifestly be 

To serve and honour thee: 
And so I do ; and my dehght is full, 
Accepted for the servant of thy rule. 

Without almost, I am all rapturous, 
Since thus my will was set 



84 SESAME AND LILIES. 

To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence : 
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse 
A pain or regret, 
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense ; 
Considering that from thee all virtues spread 

As from a fountain head, — 
That in thy gift is luisdom's best avail, 

And honour ivithont fail; 
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, 
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. 

Lady, since I conceived 
Thy pleasurable aspect in my heart, 

My life has heen apart 
In shining hrigJitness and the place of truth ; 

Which tUl that time, good sooth, 
Grroped among shadows in a darken' d place. 

Where many hours and days 
It hardly ever had remember'd good. 

But now my servitude 
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. 

A man from a wild beast 
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived. 

You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have hnd 
a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. His 
own spiritual subjection to them was indeed not so absolute ; 



OF queens' gardens. 85 

but as regards their own personal character, it was only 
Ibecause you could not have followed me so easily, that I 
did not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; 
and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and 
faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache ; 
the divine, yet rejected T\4sdom of Cassandra; the playful 
kindness and simple princess-lif) of happy Nausicaa; the 
housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon 
the sea ; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety 
of tie sister, and daughter, in Antigone ; the bowing down 
of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent ; and, finally, the expecta- 
tion of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the 
Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, 
to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness 
of death. 

Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind 
upon you if I had time. I would take Chaucer, and show 
you why he wrote a Legend of Good Women; but no 
Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, and show 
you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived and 
sometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never 
darkened, and the spear of Britomart is never broken. 
l^ay, I could go back into the mythical teaching of the 
most ancient times, and show you how the great people, — 
by one of whose princesses it was appointed that the Law- 



86 SESAME AND LILIES. 

giver of all the earth should he educated, rather than by 
his own kindred ; — how that great Egyptian people, wisest 
then of nations, gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form 
of a woman ; and into her hand, for a symbol, the weaver's 
shuttle : and how the name and the form of that spirit, 
adopted, believed, , and obeyed by the Greeks, became that 
Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to whose faith 
you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most pre- 
cious in art, in literature, or in types of national vir- 
tue. • 

But I will not wander into this distant and mythical 
element ; I will only ask you to give its legitimate value 
to the testimony of these great poets and men of the world, 
— consistent as you see it is on this head. I will ask you 
whether it can be supposed that these men, in the main 
work of their lives, are amusing themselves with a fictitious 
and idle view of the relations between man and woman ; — 
nay, worse than fictitious or idle ; for a thing may be 
imaginary, yet desirable, if it were possible ; but this, their 
ideal of women, is, according to our common idea of the 
marriage relation, wholly undesirable. The woman, we 
say, is not to guide, nor even to think, for herself. The 
man is always to be the wiser ; he is to be the thinker, the 
ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as in power. 
Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this 



OF queens' gardens. 87 

matter? Are all these great men mistaken, or are we? 
Are Shakespeare and ^schylus, Dante and Homer, merely 
dressing dolls for us ; or, worse than dolls, unnatural visions, 
the realization of which, were it possible, would bring 
anarchy into all households and ruin into all affections ? 
Nay, if you could suppose this, take lastly the evidence 
of facts, given by the human heart itself In all Christian 
ages which have been remarkable for their purity or pro- 
gress, there has been absolute yielding of obedient devo- 
tion, by the lover, to his mistress. I say obedient— woi 
merely enthusiastic and worshipping in imagination, but 
entirely subject, receiving from the beloved woman, how- 
ever young, not only the encouragement, the praise, and 
the reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice is open, or 
any question difficult of decision, the direction of all toil. 
That chivalry, to the abuse and dishonour of which are 
attributable primarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in 
peace, or corrupt and ignoble in domestic relations; and 
to the original purity and power of which we owe the 
defence ahke of faith, of law, and of love ;— that chivalry, 
I say, in its very first conception of honourable life, assumes 
the subjection of the young knight to the command— should 
it even be the command in caprice— of his lady. It assumes 
this, because its masters knew that the. first and necessary 
impulse of every truly taught and knightly heart is this 



88 SESAME AND LILIES. 

of blind service to its lady : that where that true faith and 
captivity are not, all wayward and wicked passion must be ; 
and that in this rapturous obedience to the single love of 
his youth, is the sanctification of all man's strength, and 
the continuance of all his purposes. And this, not because 
such obedience would be safe, or honourable, were it ever 
rendered to the nnworthy; but because it ought to be 
imj)ossible for every noble youth — it is impossible for every 
one rightly trained — to love any one wliose gentle counsel 
he cannot trust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate 
to obey. 

I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I 
think it should commend itself at once to your knowledge 
of what has been and to your feeling of what should be. 
You cannot think that the buckling on of the knight's 
armour by his lady's hand was a mere caprice of romantic 
fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth — that the soul's 
armour is never well set to the heart unless a woman's 
hand has braced it ; and it is only when she braces it loosely 
that the honour of manhood fails. Know you not those 
lovely lines — I would they were learned by all youthful 
ladies of England : — 

" Ah wasteful woman I she who may 
On her sw«et self set her own price, 
Knowing he cannot choose but pay — 



OF queens' gardens. 89 

How has she cheapen'd Paradise ! 
How given for nought her priceless gift, 
How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine, 
Which, spent with due, respective thrift, 
Had made brutes men, and men divine ! " * 

Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I 
believe you will accept. But what we too often doubt is 
the fitness of the continuance of such a relation throughout 
the whole of human life. We think it right in the lover 
and mistress, not in the husband and wife. That is to say, 
we think that a reverent and tender duty is due to one 
whose affection we still doubt, and whose character we as 
yet do but partially and distantly discern ; ' and that this 
reverence and duty are to be withdrawn when the affection 
has become wholly and limitlessly our own, and the charac- 
ter has been so sifted and tried that we fear not to entrust 
it with the happiness of our lives. Do you not see how 
ignoble this is, as well as how unreasonable? Do you not 
feel that marriage — when it is marriage at all, — is only the 
seal which marks the vowed transition of temporary into 
untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love ? 

But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function 
of the woman reconcileable with a true wifely subjection? 
Simply in that it is a guiding, not a determining, function. 
* Coventry Patmore. 



90 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Let me try to show you briefly how these powers seem to be 
rightly distinguishable. 

"We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in sj^eaking of 
the " superiority " of one sex to the other, as if they could be 
compared in similar things. Each has what the other has 
not ; each completes the other, and is completed by the 
other : they are iu nothing alike, and the happiness and per- 
fection of both depends on each asking and receiving from 
the other what the other only can give. 

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's 
power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the 
doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect 
is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, 
for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever 
conquest necessary. But the woman's power is for rule, not 
for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, 
but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision. She sees 
the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her 
great function is Praise : she enters into no contest, but 
infallibly judges the crown of contest. By her office, and 
place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The 
man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all 
peril and trial : — to him, therefore, the failure, the offence, 
the inevitable error : often he must be wounded, or subdued, 
often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the 



OF queens' gardens. 91 

woman from all this ; within his house, as ruled by her, unless 
she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no tempta- 
tion, no cause of error or offence. This is the true nature 
of home — it is the place of Peace ; the shelter, not only from 
all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far 
as it is not this, it is not home ; so far as the anxieties of the 
outer life penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, 
unknown, unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is 
allowed by either husband or wife to cross the threshold, it 
ceases to be home ; it is then only a part of that outer world 
which you have roofed over, and lighted fire in. But so far 
as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth 
watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none 
may come but those whom they can receive with love, — so 
far as it is this, and roof and fire are types only of a nobler 
shade and light, — shade as of the rock in a weary land, and 
light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea ; — so far it vindicates 
the name, and fulfils the praise, of home. 

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always 
round her. The stars only may be over her head ; the glow- 
worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her 
foot : but home is yet wherever she is ; and for a noble 
woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with 
cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, 
for those who else were homeless. 



92 SESAME AND LILIES. 

This, then, I believe to be, — will you not admit it to b(.', — 
the woman's true place and power ? But do not you see 
that to fulfil this, she must — as far as one can use such terms 
of a human creature — be incapable of error ? So far as she 
rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be endur- 
ingly, incorruptibly good ; instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, 
not for self-development, but for self-renunciation : wise, not 
that she may set herself above her husband, but that she 
may never fail from his side : wise, not with the narrowness 
of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentle- 
ness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, 
modesty of service — the true changefulness of woman. In 
that great sense — " La donna e mobile," not " Qual piiim' al 
vento ; " no, nor yet " Variable as the shade, by the light 
quivering aspen made ;" but variable as the light^ manifold iu 
fair and serene division, that it may take the colour of all that 
it falls upon, and exalt it. 

II. I have been trying, thus far, to show you what should 
be the place, and what the power of woman. Now, secondly, 
we ask, "What kind of education is to fit her for these ? 

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her office 
and dignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course of 
education which would fit her for the one, and raise her to 
the other. 

The first of our duties to her — no thoughtful persons now 



OF queens' gardens. 93 

d?^abt this, — is to secure for her such physical training and 
exercise as may confirm her health, and perfect her beauty : 
the highest refinement of that beauty being unattainable 
without splendour of activity and of delicate strength. To 
perfect her beauty, I say, and increase its power ; it cannot 
be too powerful, nor shed its sacred light too far: only 
remember that all physical freedom is vain to produce beauty 
without a corresponding freedom of heart. There are two 
passages of that poet who is distinguished, it seems to me, 
from all others — not by power, but by exquisite Tightness — 
which point you to the source, and describe to you, in a few 
syllables, the completion of womanly beauty. I will read the 
introductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you 
specially to notice : 

" Three years she grew in sun and shower, 
Then Nature said, a lovelier flower 

On earth was never sown. 
This child I to myself will take ; 
She shall be mine, and I wiU make 
A lady of my own. 

" Myself will to my darling be 
Both law and impulse ; and with me 

The girl, in rock and plain, 
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower, 



94 SESAME AND LILIES. 

Shall feel an overseeing power 
To kindle, or restrain. 

" The floating clouds their state shall lend 
To her, for her the willow bend ; 

Nor shall she fail to see 
Even in the motions of the storm, 
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form 

By silent sympathy. 

" And vital feelings of delight 
Shall rear her form to stately height, — 

Her virgin bosom swell. 
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give, 
While she and I together live, 
Here in tliis happy dell." 

" Vital feelings of delight," observe. There are deadly 
feelings of delight ; but the natural ones are vital, necessary 
to very life. 

And they must be feelings of delight, if they are to be 
vital. Do not think you can make a girl lovely, if you do not 
make her happy. There is not one restraint you put on a 
good girl's nature — there is not one check you give to her 
instincts of affection or of effort — which will not be indelibly 
written on her features, with a hardness which is all the more 
painful because it takes away the brightness from the 



OF queens' gardens. 95 

eyes of innocence, and the charm from the brow of vir- 
tue. 

This for the means : now note the end. Take from the 
same poet, in two lines, a perfect description of womanly 
beauty — 

" A countenance in which did meet 
Sweet records, promises as sweet." 

The perfect loveliness of a woman's countenance can only 
consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in the 
memory of happy and useful years, — ^fuU of sweet records ; 
and from the joining of this with that yet more majestic 
childishness, which is still full of change and promise; — 
opening always — modest at once, and bright, with hope of 
better things to be won, and to be bestowed. There is no 
old age where there is still that promise — it is eternal youth. 

Thus, then, you have first to mould her physical frame, 
and then, as the strength she gains will permit you, to fill 
and temper her mind with all knowledge and thoughts which 
tend to confirm its natural instincts of justice, and refine its 
natural tact of love. 

All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her 
to understand, and even to aid, the work of men : and yet it 
should be given, not as knowledge, — not as if it were, or 
could be, for her an object to know ; but only to feel, and to 



96 SESAME AND LILIES. 

judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or perfect- 
ness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one ; 
but it is of the utmost, that she should be able to show 
kindness to a stranger, and to understand the sweetness of a 
stranger's tongue. It is of no moment to her own worth or 
dignity that she should be acquainted with this science or 
that ; but it is of the highest that she should be trained in 
habits of accurate thought ; that she should understand the 
meaning, the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural 
laws, and follow at least some one path of scientific attain- 
ment, as far as to the threshold of that bitter Yalley of Humi- 
liation, into which only the wisest and bravest of men can 
descend, owning themselves for ever children, gathering peb- 
bles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how 
many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of 
events, or how many names of celebrated persons — it is not 
the object of education to turn a woman into a dictionary ; 
but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught to enter 
with her whole personality into the history she reads ; to 
picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagina- 
tion ; to a^Dprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic cir- 
cumstances and dramatic relations, which the historian too 
often only eclipses by his reasoning, and disconnects by his 
arrangement : it is for her to trace the hidden equities of 
divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness, of the 



OF queens' gardens. 97 

fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with its retri- 
bution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the 
limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is 
being for ever determined, as the moments pass in which she 
draws her peaceful breath ; and to the contemporary cala- 
mity which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would recur 
no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining 
what would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she 
were daily brought into the presence of the suffering which 
is not the less real because shut from her sight. She is to be 
taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the pro- 
portion which that little world in which she lives and loves, 
bears to the world in which God lives and loves ; — and 
solemnly she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of 
piety may not be feeble in proportion to the number they 
embrace, nor her prayer more languid than it is for the mo- 
mentary relief from pain of her husband or her child, when 
it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none to 
love them, — and is "for all who are desolate and oppressed." 
Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence ; perhaps 
you will not be with me in what I believe is most needful for 
me to say. There is one dangerous science for women — one 
which let them indeed beware how they profanely touch — 
that of theology. Strange, and miserably strange, that whUe 

they are modest enough to doubt their powers, and pause at 

5 



98 SESAME AND LILIES. 

the threshold of sciences where every step is demonstrable 
and sure, they will plunge headlong, and without one thought 
of incompetency, into that science in which the greatest men 
have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, that they will 
complacently and j^ridefully bind up whatever vice or folly 
there is in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind 
incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated 
myrrh. Strange, in creatures born to be Love visible, that 
where they can know least, they will condemn first, and think 
to recommend themselves to their Master by scrambling up 
the steps of His judgment-throne, to divide it with Him. 
Most strange, that they should think they were led by the 
Spirit of the Comforter into habits of mind which have 
become in them the unmixed elements of home discomfort ; 
and that they dare to turn the Household Gods of Christi- 
anity into ugly idols of their own — spiritual dolls, for them 
to dress according to their caprice ; and from which their 
husbands must turn away in grieved contempt, lest they 
should be shrieked at for breaking them. 

I believe, then, with this exception, that a girl's education 
should be nearly, in its course and material of study, the 
same as a boy's ; but quite differently directed. A woman, 
in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is 
likely to know, but- to know it in a different way. His com- 
mand of it should be foundational and progressive, hers, 



OF queens' gaedens. 99 

general and accoraplislied for daily and helpful use. Not but 
that it would often be wiser in men to learn things in a 
womanly sort of way, for present use, and to seek for the 
discipline and training of their mental powers in such 
branches of study as will be afterwards fittest for social 
service ; but, speaking broadly, a man ought to know any 
language or science he learns, thoroughly, while a woman 
ought to know the same language, or science, only so far as 
may enable her to sympathise in her husband's pleasures, 
and in those of his best friends. 

Yet, observe, with exquisite accuracy as far as she reaches. 
There is a wide difference between elementary knowledge 
and superficial knowledge — between a firm beginning, and a 
feeble smattering. A woman may always help her husband 
by what she knows, however little ; by what she half-knows, 
or mis-knows, she will only teaze him. 

And, indeed, if there ^vere to be any difference between a 
girl's education and a boy's, I should say that of the two the 
girl should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, into 
deejD and serious subjects ; and that her range of literature 
should be, not more, but less frivolous, calculated to add the 
qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy 
of thought and quickness of wit ; and also to keep her in a 
lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any 
question of choice of books ; only be sure that her books are 



100 SESAME AST) LILIES. 

not heaped up in her lap as they Ml out of the package of 
the circulating library, wet with the last and lightest spray of 
the fountain of folly. 

Or even of the fountain of wit ; for with respect to that 
sore temptation of novel-reading, it is not the badness of a 
novel that we should dread, but its over-wrought interest. 
The weakest romance is not so stupifying as the lower forms 
of rehgious exciting literature, and the worst romance is 
not so corrupting as false history, false philosophy, or false 
political essays. But the best romance becomes daugerous, 
if, by its excitement, it renders the ordinary course of Hfe 
uninteresting, and increases the morbid thirst for useless 
acquaintance with scenes in which we shall never be called 
upon to act. 

I speak therefore of good novels only ; and our modern 
literature is particularly rich in types of such. "Well read, 
indeed, these books Lave serious use, being nothing less than 
treatises on moral anatomy and chemistry ; studies of human 
nature in the elements of it. But I attach little weight to 
this function: they are hardly ever read with earnestness 
enough to permit them to fulfil it. The utmost they usually 
do is to enlarge somewhat the charity of a kind reader, or the 
bitterness of a malicious one ; for each will gather, from the 
novel, food for her own disposition. Those who are naturally 
proud and envious will learn from Thackeray to despise 



OF queens' gaedens. 101 

humanity ; those who are naturally gentle, to pity it ; those 
who are naturally shallow, to laugh at it. So, also, there 
might be a serviceable power in novels to bring before us, in 
vividness, a human truth which we had before dimly con- 
ceived ; but the temptation to picturesqueness of statement 
is so great, that often the best writers of fiction cannot resist 
it ; and our ^dews are rendered so violent and one-sided, that 
their vitality is rather a harm than good. 

Without, however, venturing here on any attempt at 
decision how much novel-reading should be allowed, let me 
at least clearly assert this, that whether novels, or poetry, or 
history be read, they should be chosen, not for what is out 
of them, but for what is m them. The chance and scattered 
evil that may here and there haunt, or hide itself in, a 
powerful book, never does any harm to a noble girl ; but the 
emptiness of an author oppresses her, and his amiable folly 
degrades her. And if she can have access to a good library 
of old and classical books, there need be no choosing at all. 
Keep the modern magazine and novel out of your girl's way : 
turn her loose into the old library every wet day, and let her 
alone. She will find what is good for her ; you cannot : for 
there is just this difference between the making of a girl's 
character and a boy's — you may chisel a boy into shape, as 
you would a rock, or hammer him into it, if he be of a better 
kind, as you would a piece of bronze. But you cannot 



102 SESAME AND LILIES. 

hammer a girl into anything. She grows as a flower does, — 
she will wither without sun ; she will decay in her sheath, as 
the narcissus does, if you do not give lier air enough ; she 
may fall, and defile her head in dust, if you leave her without 
help at some moments of her life; but you cannot fetter 
her ; she must take her own fair form and way, if she take 
any, and in mind as in body, must have always 

" Her household motions light and free 
And steps of virgin liberty." 

Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn 
in a field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better 
than you ; and the good ones too, and will eat some bitter 
and prickly ones, good for it, which you had not the slightest 
thought were good. 

Then, in art, keep the finest models before her, and let her 
practice in all accomplishments be accurate and thorough, 
so as to enable her to understand more than she accomplishes. 
I say the finest models — ^that is to say, the truest, simplest, 
usefuUest. Note those epithets ; they will range through all 
the arts. Try them in music, where you might think them 
the least applicable. I say the truest, that in which the notes 
most closely and faithfully express the meaning of the words, 
or the character of intended emotion ; again, the simplest, 
that in which the meaning and melody are attained with the 



OF queens' gardens. 103 

fewest and most significant notes possible ; and, finally, the 
usefullest, that music which makes the best words most 
"beautiful, which enchants them in our memories each with its 
own glory of sound, and which applies them closest to the 
heart at the moment we need them. 

And not only in the material and in the course, but yet 
more earnestly in the spirit of it, let a girl's education be as 
serious as a boy's. You bring up your girls as if they were 
meant for sideboard ornaments, and then complain of their 
frivolity. Give them the same advantages that you give 
their brothers — appeal to the same grand instincts of virtue 
in them; teach them also that courage and truth are the 
pillars of their being: do you think that they would not 
answer that appeal, brave and true as they are even now, 
when you know that there is hardly a girl's school in this 
Christian kingdom where the children's courage or sincerity 
would be thought of half so much importance as their way 
of coming in at a door ; and when the whole system of 
society, as respects the mode of establishing them in life, is 
one rotten plague of cowardice and imposture — cowardice, in 
not daring to let them live, or love, except as their neigh- 
bours choose ; and imposture, in bringing, for the purpose of 
our own pride, the full glow of the world's worst vanity upon 
a girl's eyes, at the very period when the whole happiness 
of her future existence depends upon her remaining undazzled ? 



104: SESAME AND LILIES. 

And give them, lastly, not only noble teachings, but noble 
teachers. You consider somewhat, before you send your 
boy to school, what kind of a man the master is ; — whatso- 
ever kind of man he is, you at least give him full authority 
over your son, and show some respect to him yourself; if he 
comes to dine with you, you do not put him at a side table ; 
you know also that, at his college, your child's immediate 
tutor will be under the direction of some still higher tutor, for 
whom you have absolute reverence. You do not treat the Dean 
of Christ Church or the Master of Trinity as your inferiors. 

But what teachers do you give your girls, and what reve- 
rence do you show to the teachers you have chosen ? Is a 
girl likely to think her o^oi conduct, or her own intellect, of 
much importance, when you trust the entire formation of 
her character, moral and intellectual, to a person whom you 
let your servants treat with less respect than they do your 
housekeeper (as if the soul of your child were a less charge 
than jams and groceries), and whom you yourself think you 
confer an honour uj)on by letting her sometimes sit in the 
drawing-room in the evening ? 

Thus, then, of literature as her help, and thus of art. 
There is one more help which she cannot do without — one 
which, alone, has sometimes done more than all other in- 
fluences besides, — the help of wild and fair nature. Hear 
this of the education of Joan of Arc : 



OF queens' gaedens. 105 

" The education of this poor gW was mean aceording to the present 
standard; was ineffably grand, according to a purer philosophic stand- 
ard; and only not good for our age, because for us it would he unat- 

tainable. * * * 

"Next after her spiritual advantages, she owed most to the advan- 
tages of her situation. The fountain of Domrtoy was on the brink 
of a boundless forest; and It was haunted to that degree by fairies, 
that the parish priest (curl) was obliged to read mass there once a 
year, in order to keep them in any decent bounds. * * * 

"But the forests of Domr€my-those were the glories of the land , 
for in them abode mysterious powers and ancient secrets that towered 
into tragic strength. 'Abbeys there were, and abbey windows,'- 
"like Moorish temples of the Hindoos,' that exercised even princely 
power both in Touraine and in the German Diets. These had their 
sweet bells that pierced the forests for many a league at matms or 
vespers, and each its own dreamy legend. Few enough, and scat- 
tered enough, were these abbeys, so as in no degree to disturb the 
deep solitude of the region; yet many enough to spread a network 
or awning of Christian sanctity over what else might have seemed a 
heatlien wilderness." * 

Now, yott cannot, indeed, have here in England, woods 
eighteen miles deep to the centre; but you can, perhaps, 
keep a fairy or two for your children yet, if you wish to keep 
them. But do you wish it? Suppose you had each, at the 
* "Joan of Arc: in reference to M. Michelefs History of France." De 
Quincey's ■Works. Tol. iii. p. 211. 



106 SESAME AND LILIES. 

back of your houses, a garden, large enough for your chil- 
dren to play in, with just as much lawn as would give them 
room to run, — no more — and that you could not change your 
abode ; but that, if you chose, you could double your income, 
or quadruple it, by digging a coal shaft in the middle of 
the lawn, and turning the flower-beds into heaps of coke. 
Would you do it ? I think not. I can tell you, you would 
be wrong if you did, though it gave you income sixty-fold 
instead of four-fold. 

Yet this is what you are doing with all England. The 
whole country is but a little garden, not more than enough 
for your children to run on the lawns of, if you would let 
them all run there. And this little garden you will turn into 
furnace-ground, and fill with heaps of cinders, if you can ; 
and those children of yours, not you, will suffer for it. For 
the fairies will not be all banished; there are fairies of the 
furnace as of the wood, and their first gifts seem to be 
" sharp arrows of the mighty;" but their last gifts are " coals 
of juniper." 

And yet I cannot — though there is no part of my subject 
that I feel more — press this upon you ; for we made so little 
use of the power of nature while we had it that we shall 
hardly feel what we have lost. Just on the other side of the 
Mersey you have your Snowdon, and your Menai Straits, 
and that mighty granite rock beyond the moors of Anglesea, 



OF queens' gardens. 107 

splendid in its heathery crest, and foot planted in the deep 
sea, once thought of as sacred — a divine promontory, looking 
westward ; the Holy Head or Headland, still not without 
awe when its red light glares first through storm. These 
are the hills, and these the bays and blue inlets, v/hich, 
among the Greeks, would have been always loved, always 
fateful in influence on the national mind. That Snowdon is 
your Parnassus ; but where are its Muses ? That Holyhead 
mountain is your Island of ^gina, but where is its Temple 
to Minerva ? 

Shall I read you what the Christian Minerva had achieved 
under the shadow of our Parnassus, up to the year 1848? — 
Here is a little account of a Welsh school, from page 261 of 
the Report on Wales, published by the Committee of Coun- 
cil on Education. This is a school close to a town contain- 
ing 5,000 persons : — 

" I then called up a larger class, most of whom had recently come 
to the school. Three girls repeatedly declared they had never heard 
of Christ, and two that they had never heard of.Grod. Two out of six 
thought Christ was on earth now (' they might have had a worse 
thought, perhaps'), three knew nothing about the crucifixion. Four 
out of seven did not know the names of the months, nor the number 
of days in a year. They had no notion of addition beyond two and 
two, or three and three ; their minds were perfect blanks." 

Oh ye women of England ! from the Princess of that Wales 



108 SESAME AND LILIES. 

to the simplest of you, do not think your own children can 
be brought into their true fold of rest while these are scat- 
tered on the hills, as sheep having no shepherd. And do not 
think your daughters can be trained to the truth of their 
own human beauty, while the pleasant places, which God 
made at once for their school-room and their play-ground, 
lie desolate and defiled. You cannot baptize them rightly 
in those inch-deep fonts of yours, unless you baptize them 
also in the sweet waters which the great Lawgiver strikes 
forth for ever from the rocks of your native land — waters 
which a Pagan would have worshipped in their purity, and 
you only worship with pollution. You cannot lead your chil- 
dren faithfully to those narrow axe-hewn church altars of 
yours, while the dark azure altars in heaven — the mountains 
that sustain your island throne, — mountains on which a 
Pagan would have seen the powers of heaven rest in every 
wreathed cloud — ^remain for you without inscription ; altars 
built, not to, but by, an Unknown God. 

ni. Thus far, then, of the nature, thus far of the teaching, 
of woman, and thus of her household office, and queenliness. 
We come now to our last, our widest question, — What is 
her queenly office with respect to the state ? 

Generally, we are under an impression that a man's duties 
are public, and a woman's private. But this is not altogether 
so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own 



or queens' gardens. 109 

home, and a public work or duty, which is the expansion of 
the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal 
work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work 
and duty, which is also the expansion of that. 

Now the man's work for his own home is, as has been 
said, to secure its maintenance, progress, and defence; the 
woman's to secure its order, comfort, and loveliness. 

Expand both these functions. The man's duty as a mem- 
ber of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, in 
the advance, in the defence of the state. The woman's duty, 
as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the order- 
ing, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the 
state. 

What the man is at his own gate, defending it, if need be, 
against insult and spoil, that also, not in a less, but in a more 
devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country, 
leaving his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his 
more incumbent work there. 

And, in like manner, what the woman is to be wkhin her 
gates, as the centre of cy^der, the balm of distress, and the 
mirror of beauty ; that she is also to be without her gates, 
where order is more difficult, distress more imminent, love- 
liness more rare. 

And as within the human heart there is always set an 
instinct for all its real duties, — an instinct which you cannot 



110 SESAME AND LILIES. 

quench, but only warp and corrupt if you withdraw it from 
its true purpose; — as there is the intense instinct of love, 
which, rightly disciplined, maintains all the sanctities of life, 
and, misdirected, undermines them; and must do either the 
one or the other ; so there is in the human heart an inextin- 
guishable instinct, the love of power, which, rightly directed, 
maintains all the majesty of law and life, and misdirected, 
wrecks them. 

Deej) rooted in the innermost life of the heart of man, and 
of the heart of woman, God set it there, and God keeps 
it there. Vainly, as falsely, you blame or rebuke the desire 
of power ! — For Heaven's sake, and for Man's sake, desire it 
all you can. But what power ? That is all the question. 
Power to destroy ? the lion's limb, and the dragon's breath ? 
Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard. 
Power of the sceptre and shield ; the power of the royal 
hand that heals in touching, — that binds the fiend and looses 
the captive ; the throne that is founded on the rock of 
Justice, and descended from only by steps of mercy. Will 
you not covet such power as thisj^and seek such throne as 
this, and be no more housewives, but queens? 

It is now long since the women of England arrogated, 
universally, a title which once belonged to nobihty only ; 
and, having once been in the habit of accepting the simple 
title of gentlewoman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, 



OF queens' gardens. Ill 

insisted on the privilege of assuming the title of " Lady," * 
which properly corresponds only to the title of " Lord." 

I do not blame them for this ; but only for their narrow 
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the 
title of Lady, provided they claim, not merely the title, but 
the office and duty signified by it. Lady means "bread- 
giver " or " loaf-giver," and Lord means " maintainer of 
laws," and both titles have reference, not to the law which is 
maintained in the house, nor to the bread which is given to 
the household ; but to law maintained for the multitude, and 
to bread broken among the multitude. So that a Lord has 
legal claim only to his title in so far as he is the maintainer 
of the justice of the Lord of Lords; and a Lady has legal 
claim to her title, only so far as she communicates that 
help to the poor representatives of her Master, which women 
once, ministering to Plim of their substance, were permitted 
to extend to that Master Himself; and when she is known, 
as He Himself once was, in breaking of bread. 

* I msli there were a true order of chivalry instituted for our Enghsh 
youth of certain ranks, in which both boy and girl should receive, at a 
given age, their knighthood and ladyhood by true title ; attainable only by 
certain probation and trial both of character and accomplishment ; and to 
be forfeited, on conviction, by their peers, of any dishonourable act Such 
an institution would be entirely, and with aU noble results, possible, in a 
nation which loved honour. That it would not be possible among us, 
is not to the discredit of the scheme. 



112 SESAME AND LILIES. 

And this beneficent and legal dominion, this j^ower of the 
Dominus, or House Lord, and of the Doniina, or House-Lady, 
is great and venerable, not in the number of those through 
whom it has lineally descended, but in the number of those 
whom it grasps within its sway ; it is always regarded with 
reverent worship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, 
and its ambition co-relative with its beneficence. Your fancy 
is pleased with the thought of being noble ladies, with a 
train of vassals. Be it so ; you cannot be too noble, and 
your train cannot be too great ; but see to it that your train 
is of vassals whom you serve and feed, not merely of slaves 
who serve and feed you y and that the multitude which 
obeys you is of those whom you have comforted, not oppress- 
ed, — whom you have redeemed, not led into captivity. 

And this, which is true of the lower or household dominion, 
is equally true of the queenly dominion ; — that highest dignity 
is open to you, if you will also accept that highest duty. 
Rex et Regina — Roi et Reine — " Right-^OQT^ ; " they differ 
but from the Lady and Lord, in that their power is supreme 
over the mind as over the person — that they not only feed 
and clothe, but direct and teach. And whether consciously 
or not, you must be, in many a heart, enthroned : there is no 
putting by that crown ; queens you must always be ; queens 
to your lovers ; queens to your husbands and your sons ; 
queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows 



OF queens' gardens. 113 

itself, and will for ever bow, before the myrtle crown, and 
the stainless sceptre, of womanhood. But, alas ! you are too 
often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the 
least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest ; and leav- 
ing misrule and violence to work their will among men, in 
defiance of the power, which, holding straight in gift from 
the Prince of all Peace, the wicked among you betray, and 
the good forget. 

" Prince of Peace." Note that name. When kings rule 
in that name, and nobles, and the judges of the earth, they 
also, in their narrow place, and mortal measure, receive the 
power of it. There are no other rulers than they : other rule 
than theirs is but misrule ; they who govern verily " Dei 
gratia " are all princes, yes, or princesses, of peace. There 
is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women 
are answerable for it ; not in that you have provoked, but in 
that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone 
to fight ; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for 
you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when 
there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no 
misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies lastly with you. 
Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to 
bear it. Men may tread it down without sympathy in their 
own struggle; but men are feeble in sympathy, and con- 
tracted in hope ; it is you only who can feel the depths of 



114 SESAME AND LILIES. 

pain ; and conceive the way of its healing. Instead of trying 
to do this, you tvirn away from it ; you shut yourselves within 
your park walls and garden gates ; and you are content to 
know that there is beyond them a whole world in wilderness 
— a world of secrets which you dare not penetrate ; and of 
suffering which you dare not conceive. 

I tell you that this is to me quite the most amazing among 
the phenomena of humanity. I am surprised at no depths to 
which, when once warped from its honour, that humanity can 
be degraded. I do not wonder at the miser's death, with 
his hands, as they relax, dropping gold. I do not wonder at 
the sensualist's life, with the shroud wrapped about his feet. 
I do not wonder at the single-handed murder of a single 
victim, done by the assassin in the darkness of the rail way, 
or reed-shadow of the marsh. I do not even wonder at the 
myriad-handed murder of multitudes, done boastfully in the 
daylight, by the frenzy of nations, and the immeasurable, 
unimaginable guilt, heaped up from hell to heaven, of their 
priests, and kings. But this is wonderful to me— oh, how 
wonderful! — to see the tender and delicate woman among 
you, with her child at her breast, and a power, if she would 
wield it, over it, and over its father, purer than the air of 
heaven, and stronger than the seas of earth — nay, a magni- 
tude of blessing which her husband would not part with for 
all that earth itself, though it were made of one entire and 



OF queens' gakdens. 115 

perfect chrysolite :— to see her abdicate this majesty to play 
at precedence with her next-door neighbour ! This is won- 
derful—oh, wonderful !— to see her, with every innocent feel- 
ing fresh within her, go out in the morning into her garden 
to play with the fringes of its guarded flowers, and lift their 
heads when they are drooping, with her happy smile upon 
her face, and no cloud upon her brow, because there is a 
little wall around her place of peace ; and yet she knows, in 
her heart, if she would only look for its knowledge, that, 
outside of that little rose-covered wall, the wild grass, to the 
horizon, is torn up by the agony of men, and beat level by 
the drift of their life-blood. 

Have you ever considered what a deep under meaning 
there lies, or at least, may be read, if we choose, in our cus- 
tom of strewing flowers before those whom we think most 
happy ? Tfo you suppose it is merely to deceive them into 
the hope that happiness is always to fall thus in showers at 
their feet?— that wherever they pass they will tread on herbs 
of sweet scent, and that the rough ground will be made 
smooth for them by depth of roses? So surely as they 
believe that, they will have, instead, to walk on bitter herbs 
and thorns; and the only softness to their feet will be of 
snow. But it is not thus intended they should believe; 
there is a better meaning in that old custom. The path of a 
good woman is indeed strewn with flowers; but they rise 



116 SESAME AND LILIES. 

behind her steps, not before them. " Her feet have touched 
the meadows, and left the daisies rosy." You think that 
only a lover's fancy ; — false and vain ! How if it could be 
true ? You think this also, perhaps, only a poet's fancy — 

" Even the light harebell raised its head 
Elastic from her airy tread." 

But it is little to say of a woman, that she only does not 
destroy where she passes. She should revive ; the harebells 
should bloom, not stoop, as she passes. You think I am 
going into wild hyperbole ? Pardon me, not a whit — I 
mean what I say in calm English, spoken in resolute truth. 
You have heard it said — (and I believe there is more than 
fancy even in that saying, but let it pass for a fanciful one) — 
that flowers only flourish rightly in the garden of some one 
who loves them. I know you would like that to be true ; 
you would think it a pleasant magic if you could flush your 
flowers into brighter bloom by a kind look upon them : nay, 
more, if your look had the power, not only to cheer, but to 
guard them — if you could bid the black blight turn away, 
and the knotted caterpillar spare — if you could bid the dew 
fall upon them in the drought, and say to the south wind, in 
frost — " Come, thou south, and breathe upon my garden, that 
the spices of it may flow out." This you would think a 
great thing ? And do you think it not a greater thing, that 



OF queens' gardens. 117 

all this, (and how much more than this ! ) you can do, for 
fairer flowers than these — flowers that could bless you for 
having blessed them, and will love you for having loved 
them ; — flowers that have eyes like yours, and thoughts like 
yours, and lives like yours ; which, once saved, you save for 
ever ? Is this only a little power ? Far among the moor- 
lands and the rocks, — far in the darkness of the terrible 
streets, — these feeble florets are lying, with all their fresh 
leaves torn, and their stems broken — will you never go down 
to them, nor set them in order in their little fragrant beds, 
nor fence them in their shuddering from the fierce wind? 
Shall morning follow morning, for you, but not for them ; 
and the dawn rise to watch, far away, those frantic Dances 
of Death ;* but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living 
banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose ; nor call to 
you, through your casement, — call, (not giving you the name 
of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great 
Matilda, who, on the edge of happy Lethe, stood, wreathing 
flowers with flowers,) saying : — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown, 
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad 
And the musk of the roses blown ?" 

"Will you not go down among them ? — among those sweet 
* See note, p. SY. 



118 SESAME AND LILIES. 

living things, whose new courage, sprung from the earth 
with the deep colour of heaven upon it, is starting up in 
strength of goodly spire ; and whose purity, washed from 
the dust, is opening, bud by bud, into the flower of promise ; 
— and still they turn to you, and for you, " The Larkspur 
listens — I hear, I hear ! And the Lily whispers — I wait." 

Did you notice that I missed two lines when I read you 
that first stanza; and think that I had forgotten them? 
Hear them now : — 

" Come into the garden, Maud, 
For the black bat, night, has flown ; 
Come into the garden, Maud, 
I am here at the gate, alone." 

Who is it, think you, who stands at the gate of this 
sweeter garden, alone, waiting for you ? Did you ever hear, 
not of a Maude, but a Madeleine, who went down to her 
garden in the dawn, and found One waiting at the gate, 
whom she suj^posed to be the gardener? Have you not 
sought Him often; — sought Him in vain, all through the 
night; — sought Him in vain at the gate of that old garden 
where the fiery sword is set? He is never there ; but at the 
gate of this garden He is waiting always — waiting to take 
your hand — ready to go down to see the fruits of the valley, 



xio? 



OF queens' gardens. 119 

to see whether the vine has flourished, and the pomegranate 
budded. There you shall see with Him the little tendrils of 
the vines that His hand is guiding — there you shall see the 
pomegranate springing where His hand cast the sanguine 
seed ; — more : you shall see the troops of the angel keepers 
that, with their wings, wave away the hungry birds from the 
pathsides where He has sown, and call to each other between 
the vineyard rows, " Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that 
spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes." Oh — you 
queens — you queens ! among the hills and happy greenwood 
of this land of yours, shall the foxes have holes, and the 
birds of the air have nests ; and, in your cities, shall the 
stones cry out against you, that they are the only pillows 
where the Son of Man can lay His head ? 



THE END. 







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